All's Well That Ends Well (Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages)

Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors...

Author: Harold Bloom

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Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Hamlet Henry IV (Part I) Henry V Julius Caesar King Lear Macbeth The Merchant of Venice A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado about Nothing Othello Richard III Romeo and Juliet The Sonnets The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Twelfth Night The Winter’s Tale

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Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages

A LL’ S W ELL T H AT EN D S W ELL

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

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Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages: All’s Well That Ends Well Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data All’s well that ends well / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom ; volume editor, Paul Gleed. p. cm.—(Bloom’s Shakespeare through the ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-708-8 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-3110-8 (e-book) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. All’s well that ends well. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Gleed, Paul. PR2801.A875 2010 822.3'3—dc22 2009034577 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Series design by Erika K. Arroyo Cover design by Ben Peterson Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy NY Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY Date printed: January 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

CONTENTS q

Series Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Volume Introduction by Harold Bloom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Biography of William Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Summary of All’s Well That Ends Well . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 List of Characters in All’s Well That Ends Well . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Key Passages in All’s Well That Ends Well . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 CRITICISM THROUGH THE AGES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 t All’s Well That Ends Well in the Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 1753—Charlotte Lennox. From Shakespeare Illustrated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 1765—Samuel Johnson. All’s Well That Ends Well (notes), from The Plays of William Shakespeare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 1775—Elizabeth Griffith. From The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 1777—Maurice Morgann. From An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

t All’s Well That Ends Well in the Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 1817—William Hazlitt. From Characters of Shakespear’s Plays . . . . . . . . . 29 1833—Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From Table-Talk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 1846—A. W. Schlegel. From Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 1863—Charles Cowden Clarke. From Shakespeare-Characters, Chiefly Those Subordinate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

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Contents

1864—Thomas Kenny. From The Life and Genius of Shakespeare . . . . . . 55 1896—Frederick S. Boas. From Shakespeare and His Predecessors

. . . . . 60

t All’s Well That Ends Well in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 1911—Thomas Lounsbury. From Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist . . . 72 1913—Brander Matthews. From Shakespeare as a Playwright . . . . . . . . . 73 1922—W. W. Lawrence. From “The Meaning of All’s Well That Ends Well” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 1951—E.M.W. Tillyard. From Shakespeare’s Problem Plays . . . . . . . . . . 100 1958—George Wilson Knight. From The Sovereign Flower . . . . . . . . . 120 1994—Mary Free. From Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 1997—David McCandless. From Gender and Performance in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

t All’s Well That Ends Well in the Twenty-first Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 2007—Helen Wilcox. From New Critical Essays on All’s Well That Ends Well . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

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SERIES INTRODUCTION q

Shakespeare Through the Ages presents not the most current of Shakespeare criticism, but the best of Shakespeare criticism, from the seventeenth century to today. In the process, each volume also charts the flow over time of critical discussion of a particular play. Other useful and fascinating collections of historical Shakespearean criticism exist, but no collection that we know of contains such a range of commentary on each of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and at the same time emphasizes the greatest critics in our literary tradition: from John Dryden in the seventeenth century, to Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, to William Hazlitt and Samuel Coleridge in the nineteenth century, to A. C. Bradley and William Empson in the twentieth century, to the most perceptive critics of our own day. This canon of Shakespearean criticism emphasizes aesthetic rather than political or social analysis. Some of the pieces included here are full-length essays; others are excerpts designed to present a key point. Much (but not all) of the earliest criticism consists only of brief mentions of specific plays. In addition to the classics of criticism, some pieces of mainly historical importance have been included, often to provide background for important reactions from future critics. These volumes are intended for students, particularly those just beginning their explorations of Shakespeare. We have therefore also included basic materials designed to provide a solid grounding in each play: a biography of Shakespeare, a synopsis of the play, a list of characters, and an explication of key passages. In addition, each selection of the criticism of a particular century begins with an introductory essay discussing the general nature of that century’s commentary and the particular issues and controversies addressed by critics presented in the volume. Shakespeare was “not of an age, but for all time,” but much Shakespeare criticism is decidedly for its own age, of lasting importance only to the scholar who wrote it. Students today read the criticism most readily available to them, which means essays printed in recent books and journals, especially those journals made available on the Internet. Older criticism is too often buried in out-of-print books on forgotten shelves of libraries or in defunct periodicals. Therefore, many students, particularly younger students, have no way of knowing that some of the most profound criticism of Shakespeare’s plays was written decades or centuries vii

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All’s Well That Ends Well

ago. We hope this series remedies that problem, and more importantly, we hope it infuses students with the enthusiasm of the critics in these volumes for the beauty and power of Shakespeare’s plays.

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INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM q

The odious Bertram is perhaps the most detestable person in all of Shakespeare’s plays. Helena is one of the worthiest of his admirable women, but her choice of Bertram is overdetermined and persuasive, the attachment going back—as it does—to earliest childhood. To repeat myself after a decade, marriage—whether in Shakespeare or in life—is where we are written and not where we write. The splendor of All’s Well That Ends Well has little to do with the cad Bertram or with Helena’s inevitable yet lamentable fi xation. Rather it resides in the comic villain Parolles (“Words” or “Wordy”) who talks a good fight but collapses under the least pressure into the worst of cowards. Yet Shakespeare triumphs in this wretch’s will to live: Yet I am thankful. If my heart were great ’Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more, But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft As captain shall. Simply the thing I am Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart, Let him fear this; for it will come to pass That every braggart shall be found an ass. Rust, sword, cool, blushes, and Parolles live Safest in shame; being fool’d, by fool’ry thrive. There’s place and means for every man alive. I’ll after them. What thrills me here (and shocks also) is Shakespeare’s vision of degradation that yet accepts our universal capacity for suffering (and bearing) humiliation. Nothing can crush Parolles who yet is totally crushable. Nothing will redeem Bertram, who will crush even more readily, and still Shakespeare will spare him. There is nothing in Parolles or in Bertram worthy of survival, but reality is so dark a void that survival is not to be despised.

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Mere nihilism falls away when confronted by this savage comedy, since comedy it remains. The play’s implicit motto comes in a throwaway sentence spoken by a nameless French lord: The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, our virtues would be proud if our faults whipp’d them not, and our crimes would disappear if they were not cherish’d by our virtues.

I find this so subtle it exhausts me. In the play it illuminates Helena, whose monomaniacal pursuit of Bertram transcends mere obsessiveness. Outrageously heroic, though in pursuit of the unspeakable, Helena evades every category of good judgment that we might bring to her. She must have her will, even if the rancidity of the bed-trick must carry it to her. No one, except George Bernard Shaw, ever has expressed much enthusiasm for All’s Well That Ends Well. And yet the play retains a dark vitality, where we might least expect it. Compared to the other problematic, late comedies, it lacks the dazzling perspectivism of Measure for Measure, where no two exegetes can agree on the Duke Vincentio, master of dark corners in a Vienna weirdly post-Freudian. Contrast it to Troilus and Cressida, and you miss that play’s unsettling fusion of incest and any desire whatsoever. What remains unique is the dialectic of Helena and Parolles, the valuable woman who abandons herself to a quest utterly unworthy of her, and the braggart would-be soldier of no value whatsoever who startles us by so eloquently falling back on survival as the last badge of his being.

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BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE q

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564 into a family of some prominence. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and merchant of leather goods, who earned enough to marry the daughter of his father’s landlord, Mary Arden, in 1557. John Shakespeare was a prominent citizen in Stratford, and at one point, he served as an alderman and bailiff. Shakespeare presumably attended the Stratford grammar school, where he would have received an education in Latin, but he did not go on to either Oxford or Cambridge universities. Little is recorded about Shakespeare’s early life; indeed, the first record of his life after his christening is of his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 in the church at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. He would have been required to obtain a special license from the bishop as security that there was no impediment to the marriage. Peter Alexander states in his book Shakespeare’s Life and Art that marriage at this time in England required neither a church nor a priest or, for that matter, even a document—only a declaration of the contracting parties in the presence of witnesses. Thus, it was customary, though not mandatory, to follow the marriage with a church ceremony. Little is known about William and Anne Shakespeare’s marriage. Their first child, Susanna, was born in May 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare, in 1585. Later on, Susanna married Dr. John Hall, but the younger daughter, Judith, remained unmarried. When Hamnet died in Stratford in 1596, the boy was only eleven years old. We have no record of Shakespeare’s activities for the seven years after the birth of his twins, but by 1592 he was in London working as an actor. He was also apparently well known as a playwright, for reference is made of him by his contemporary, Robert Greene, in A Groatsworth of Wit, as “an upstart crow.” Several companies of actors were in London at this time. Shakespeare may have had connection with one or more of them before 1592, but we have no record that tells us definitely. However, we do know of his long association with the most famous and successful troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. (When James I came to the throne in 1603, after Elizabeth’s death, the troupe’s name changed to the King’s Men.) In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men provided the financial backing for the construction of their own theater, the Globe. 1

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The Globe was begun by a carpenter named James Burbage and finished by his two sons, Cuthbert and Robert. To escape the jurisdiction of the Corporation of London, which was composed of conservative Puritans who opposed the theater’s “licentiousness,” James Burbage built the Globe just outside London, in the Liberty of Holywell, beside Finsbury Fields. This also meant that the Globe was safer from the threats that lurked in London’s crowded streets, like plague and other diseases, as well as rioting mobs. When James Burbage died in 1597, his sons completed the Globe’s construction. Shakespeare played a vital role, financially and otherwise, in the construction of the theater, which was finally occupied some time before May 16, 1599. Shakespeare not only acted with the Globe’s company of actors, he was also a shareholder and eventually became the troupe’s most important playwright. The company included London’s most famous actors, who inspired the creation of some of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, such as Hamlet and Lear, as well as his clowns and fools. In his early years, however, Shakespeare did not confine himself to the theater. He also composed some mythological-erotic poetry, such as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both of which were dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. Shakespeare was successful enough that in 1597 he was able to purchase his own home in Stratford, which he called New Place. He could even call himself a gentleman, for his father had been granted a coat of arms. By 1598 Shakespeare had written some of his most famous works, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, as well as his historical plays Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, and King John. Somewhere around the turn of the century, Shakespeare wrote his romantic comedies, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing, as well as Henry V, the last of his history plays in the Prince Hal series. During the next ten years he wrote his great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. At this time, the theater was burgeoning in London; the public took an avid interest in drama, the audiences were large, the plays demonstrated an enormous range of subjects, and playwrights competed for approval. By 1613, however, the rising tide of Puritanism had changed the theater. With the desertion of the theaters by the middle classes, the acting companies were compelled to depend more on the aristocracy, which also meant that they now had to cater to a more sophisticated audience. Perhaps this change in London’s artistic atmosphere contributed to Shakespeare’s reasons for leaving London after 1612. His retirement from the theater is sometimes thought to be evidence that his artistic skills were waning. During this time, however, he wrote The Tempest and Henry VIII. He also wrote the “tragicomedies,” Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. These were


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Biography of William Shakespeare

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thought to be inspired by Shakespeare’s personal problems and have sometimes been considered proof of his greatly diminished abilities. However, so far as biographical facts indicate, the circumstances of his life at this time do not imply any personal problems. He was in good health, financially secure, and enjoyed an excellent reputation. Indeed, although he was settled in Stratford at this time, he made frequent visits to London, enjoying and participating in events at the royal court, directing rehearsals, and attending to other business matters. In addition to his brilliant and enormous contributions to the theater, Shakespeare remained a poetic genius throughout the years, publishing a renowned and critically acclaimed sonnet cycle in 1609 (most of the sonnets were written many years earlier). Shakespeare’s contribution to this popular poetic genre are all the more amazing in his break with contemporary notions of subject matter. Shakespeare idealized the beauty of man as an object of praise and devotion (rather than the Petrarchan tradition of the idealized, unattainable woman). In the same spirit of breaking with tradition, Shakespeare also treated themes which hitherto had been considered off limits—the dark, sexual side of a woman as opposed to the Petrarchan ideal of a chaste and remote love object. He also expanded the sonnet’s emotional range, including such emotions as delight, pride, shame, disgust, sadness, and fear. When Shakespeare died in 1616, no collected edition of his works had ever been published, although some of his plays had been printed in separate unauthorized editions. (Some of these were taken from his manuscripts, some from the actors’ prompt books, and others were reconstructed from memory by actors or spectators.) In 1623, two members of the King’s Men, John Hemings and Henry Condell, published a collection of all the plays they considered to be authentic, the First Folio. Included in the First Folio is a poem by Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, an outstanding playwright and critic in his own right. Jonson paid tribute to Shakespeare’s genius, proclaiming his superiority to what previously had been held as the models for literary excellence—the Greek and Latin writers. “Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show / To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. / He was not of an age, but for all time!” Jonson was the fi rst to state what has been said so many times since. Having captured what is permanent and universal to all human beings at all times, Shakespeare’s genius continues to inspire us—and the critical debate about his works never ceases.


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SUMMARY OF ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL q

Act 1 As with many other Shakespeare works, the first scene of All’s Well That Ends Well anticipates and announces many of the play’s central concerns: old age, the shadow of death, sexual desire, and gender roles. The first line of the play even signals the reader that this will be no “happy comedy”: “In delivering my son from me I bury a second husband.” The Countess bemoans having so recently lost her husband, but she is now also “losing” her son to the court. As a fatherless minor, Bertram is being made a ward of the King, a practice aimed at protecting young men and women from a variety of dangers. We learn, however, that Helena, too, has lost a father, a man who was a notable and renowned doctor. Moreover, the King is ailing and is “losing hope by time” (1.1.15). Deaths real, close, and imagined cloud these opening fi fty lines, laying the foundation for both the “miraculous” escapes to come (the King’s restoration to health and Helena’s return from “the grave”) as well as the ambiguous tone of the play’s conclusion. Once Helena is alone onstage, we learn that she is attracted to Bertram, an infatuation that seems unlikely to amount to anything because, as Helena knows, “he is so above me” in social rank (1.1.82). Her solitude is soon interrupted, as Parolles makes his first appearance onstage, and the two engage in a discussion of female virginity. The exchange appears playful to our eyes, but it has attracted much contempt through the centuries as an example of Helena’s impropriety. However, many critics now point to this debate’s importance in establishing Helena as someone determined to control her own sexuality on her own terms. Certainly the exchange, on Parolles’s exit from the stage, builds up to Helena’s bold claim that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.199–200). This is a remarkable statement of agency, of the power to influence one’s own life, for an early modern woman. The classic formulation for the early modern woman was that she was always to be chaste, obedient, and silent. In this opening scene, Helena tells us bluntly that she plans to be none of these things. In the brief second scene, we are introduced to the King, who is resigned to his failing health and nostalgically remembers Bertram’s late father as a model 5


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for young men of the current time. Regretting his infirmity and old age, the King remarks that it is better to die than to live on uselessly. The third scene opens with a bawdy exchange between the play’s clown, Lavatch, and the Countess. Lavatch’s cynical views on marriage and female sexuality here can be connected to broader thematic patterns in the play. The primary action of the scene, however, is a conversation between the Countess and Helena that reveals Helena’s feelings for Bertram. When the Countess remarks that Helena should see her as a mother, Helena seems to respond in a bizarre manner. If the Countess is Helena’s mother, then that makes Bertram Helena’s brother: “He must not be my brother,” she exclaims (1.3.143). The Countess is then able to solve what she calls “The myst’ry of your loneliness” (1.3.155), identifying Helena’s love for Bertram. At this point, the conventions of Renaissance romantic comedy would typically dictate that the Duchess become an obstacle to the young lovers (parents often blocked the union of “mismatched” lovers in such plays, producing an important component of the dramatic action as the lovers ingeniously circumvent this opposition). Surprisingly, however, as many critics have noted, the Countess (as well as other older characters in the play) not only endorse Helena’s love but actively seek to unite the couple. At the close of this scene, Helena and the Countess discuss Helena’s plan to cure the King’s illness and perhaps win the state’s approval for a match with Bertram.

Act 2 The second act opens with young men heading off to war, a battle that Bertram is deemed too young to take part in. He laments that “I am commanded here, and kept a coil with / ‘Too young’ and ‘the next year’ and ‘’tis too early’” (2.1.27–28), initial signs of Bertram’s desire for independence. Bertram’s liberties are about to be threatened much more, however, as Helena and the King discuss her proposal to treat the ailing monarch with her father’s arts. The King is reluctant to accept, but Helena pledges that, should she fail, she will forfeit her honor, “my maiden’s name” (2.1.171). Helena continues her negotiations with the King and secures his promise that, if she can cure him, “Then shalt thou give me with thy kingly hand / What husband in thy power I will command” (2.1.192–93). Helena here asserts a remarkable degree of confidence and authority, again traits that would for many have marked her as a suspicious and highly unorthodox woman for her time. As Lafeu announces Helena’s success and the King’s rejuvenation at the beginning of the third scene, it is clear that we have entered unusual territory, in terms of genre. Many critics have asserted that All’s Well That Ends Well anticipates Shakespeare’s turn to the genre of romance (a type of story characterized by such things as knights and fables, magic and miracle). Certainly the details of Helena’s “art” are sketchy, but the sight of Helena and the King dancing in this scene, the


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Summary of All’s Well That Ends Well

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picture of joyous, festive comedy, when we had initially been expecting a royal funeral, moves the play out of the realm of realism and squarely into romance. As the scene plays out, the King keeps his word and calls for a group of eligible young men to be brought forward for Helena’s selection. The staging of this selection process has been much contested, and, thanks to Lafeu’s odd commentary (2.3.82), it is not clear whether the young men want to be picked or not. Helena, of course, has eyes only for one of them anyway. The lines describing Helena’s choice of Bertram are among the most important in the play and deserve careful attention. Bertram resists the choice passionately but centers his protest less on specific and detailed explanations of why he finds the match with Helena unacceptable than on broader claims about his personal freedoms. By this point it becomes clear that, as much of the critical commentary on the play in recent years explores, Shakespeare is presenting a fundamental switch of gender roles. Here, Helena is the one with the authority and control, Bertram the powerless and harried object of another’s desires and commands. As the King grows impatient with Bertram’s resistance, the threats against Bertram grow until he most reluctantly concedes and agrees to the marriage. It is somewhat surprising, then, that in the fi fth scene of the act we find Betram plotting to escape the confines of this unwanted union. The scene presents an especially frosty Bertram duping Helena into leaving him for a short time in order to care for his sick mother. Helena appears either naïve or as coldly calculating as Bertram, trying to engage him in a conversation about how happy and grateful she is for their marriage. Bertram, however, precludes the full expression of such sentiments with gruff conversation stoppers. When she cautiously reminds Bertram that lovers usually kiss when they part, Bertram asserts that there can be no delay whatsoever in Helena’s journey to his mother. On Helena’s exit, Bertram reveals his plan to escape to the wars.

Act 3 The second scene of the third act is of particular narrative importance. The Countess reads the letter dispatched by Bertram and is dismayed by its contents. Critics have pointed to the riddlelike nature of the letter, a style that anticipates Diana’s teasing riddle at the close of the play. The play itself, of course, can be viewed as one large riddle, and Shakespeare signals this possible interpretation through these particular moments of playful deception and ambiguity. “She hath recovered the King and undone me,” writes Bertram, adding “I have wedded her, not bedded her, and sworn to make the ‘not’ eternal” (3.2.20–21). Through the pun of “not” and “knot,” Bertram captures the darker possibilities of marriage as portrayed by the play. As Helena reads on, the word play becomes a direct challenge to her as well as an absolute rejection. Bertram tells Helena that if she can get his ring safely and forever on his finger, as well as become pregnant with Bertram’s child, then he will return to her. But, as Bertram


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puts it: “in such a ‘then’ I write ‘never’” (3.2.57). This challenge is revealing of Helena’s character, and of the overall play as well, that this is viewed by her as an achievable task, an obstacle to be overcome irrespective of the veracity of and emotional reality behind the words. According to genre convention and dictates, we are once again dallying with aspects of the romance. But what about Helena? Many contemporary readers have described Helena as a stalker, and certainly her decision to “attack” at this point rather than “retreat” suggests, at the very least, an obsessive passion or an unshakable will. The Countess then states that she disowns her son, and Helena’s soliloquy closes the scene in ambiguous fashion. She laments that she is responsible for Bertram being in the line of fire, pleads with the elements and weapons of war to bring no harm to him, and announces that she will run away in the hope that Bertram, hearing the news, will return at once. Helena’s thinking and motivations here seem unclear or not fully resolved, suggesting the question, is Helena misguided and naïve or manipulative and scheming, or a combination of both? Either way, Helena’s fl ight becomes a chase. After a short third scene containing Bertram’s pledge to Mars over Venus, war over love, the fourth scene marks the return of the Countess. She hopes that Helena’s plan—one that, as far as the Countess is aware, is limited to luring Bertram back by appealing to his compassion and concern for Helena’s well-being (hardly traits we can assume Bertram possesses)—is successful. These hopes are framed by an equal concern on her part for both Helena and Bertram. The fifth scene introduces Diana and her mother, the Widow. They converse with a neighbor, Mariana, about the valor and merits of the nearby troops. Bertram, they hear, has particularly distinguished himself in battle. However, we learn that Parolles has been acting as a middleman on behalf of Bertram in an attempted seduction of Diana. The neighbor warns Diana to guard against such advances, but Diana feels no temptation to take the bargain. Helena’s entry into the scene, disguised as a pilgrim from France, prompts questions from the women about Bertram’s wife, a woman they have heard the young man scorns. The disguised Helena’s description of Bertram’s wife focuses on her lack of social worth, stressing that she is not of Bertram’s station in life, despite being chaste and virtuous. In the sixth scene, we return to Bertram where he is being persuaded by two fellow nobles to test Parolles’s loyalties. One of these men gives a brilliantly bitter and unflattering account of Parolles’s poor character (3.6.7–11) and assures Bertram that, if Parolles can be tricked into fearing for his life, he will betray his young friend. Bertram agrees, but as the scene closes his mind is clearly elsewhere, on the seduction of Diana. Scene seven then sets up the “bed-trick” (a device of Renaissance theater in which someone is duped into believing he or she is sleeping with one person when, in fact, another person has been substituted). Helena convinces the Widow to help, both by indicating the honest


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virtue that informs the endeavor—she is, after all, Bertram’s legal wife—as well as by offering what amounts to a rich bribe. The trap is set. Diana will “yield” to Bertram’s advances, but only if he gives her his ring (the ring that was part of his challenge to Helena, of course). Though Helena states that he values the ring, lust will cloud his reason and he will part with it. Then, at the time set for Bertram to sleep with Diana, Helena will take her rival’s place.

Act 4 Act four opens with the gulling of Parolles. The conspirators gather and wait for Parolles to enter. They plan to speak nonsense language and have a “translator” address Parolles on their behalf. This play with language reminds us that Parolles, too, speaks words that have no meaning, as he confesses, thinking he is alone, when he enters. He fears that people are beginning to suspect that he is a coward, but he is too frightened of war and warriors to engage in battle. Earlier we learn that he has lost his army’s drum (an important symbol for the army), and he is now on a “mission” to reclaim it, or rather to look as though he has tried to reclaim it. When the gentlemen reveal themselves and “capture” Parolles, the braggart soldier immediately promises to reveal all he knows about his own side in exchange for his life. From one form of deception, we are confronted with another. Unaware of Diana and Helena’s agreement, Bertram’s attempted seduction of Diana continues in the second scene. He promises Diana that he will love her sincerely once he has won her affection, to which Diana asserts a facade of resistance. After claiming Bertram’s ring, Diana concedes and arranges a time and place for their next meeting that night. After Betram exits, Diana pledges herself once more to virginity and justifies her part in the deception of Bertram by pointing out his own dishonesty and ignoble intentions. Cutting back and forth between these parallel episodes, Shakespeare returns to Parolles’s predicament in scene three. Two noble lords discuss their sadness over Bertram’s friendship with Parolles as well as his plans for Diana. We also learn from them the report of Helena’s death and that Bertram has no doubt received the news as a welcome release. The lords hope that by unmasking Parolles as a traitor and coward, Bertram may begin to correct his own behavior. When Bertram arrives, the disguised conspirators begin to question Parolles about the strength of his army and the characters of individual men (the two nobles present, as well as Bertram). Parolles freely gives vital information and scandalous accounts of the noble lords, criticizing Betram’s lusts and desires. Having heard enough, the conspirators reveal themselves, and Parolles is forced to face his shame. The final lines of the scene are given to Parolles and show him in repentant, even philosophical mood about his disgrace. He will, he says, retire and live a quiet life of shame, hopeful that others like him will learn from the story of his folly.


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A brief fourth scene serves to confirm that Helena’s schemes are unfolding as planned. She thanks the Widow and Diana but tells them she needs their help for a little while longer in order to bring her plan to fruition. Another short scene closes the act. The opening lines of the fifth scene contain Lavatch’s observation that Parolles should be blamed more than Bertram for the death of Helena and the tragedy of their marriage. Many critics have suggested that Parolles functions as a scapegoat for Bertram in absorbing much of the blame for the young man’s behavior. The Countess then learns that Bertram is coming home and that Lafeu has asked the King to arrange a marriage between Bertram and Lafeu’s daughter. She consents to the pairing.

Act 5 The first short scene reminds us that Helena, Diana, and the Widow travel to see the King, while a second scene shows Parolles being returned to the action of the play by Lafeu: “Thou you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat” (5.2.44). This “return” of Parolles has puzzled some critics because it seems unnecessary, unexpected within the moral logic of the play. In short, it is an element of pure, orthodox comedy in which even the antagonists are invited to the festive feast of resolution that traditionally closes a comedy. This is no orthodox comedy, however, and this lighter, more positive moment amid the darker uncertainties of the play’s conclusion has been the object of much critical discussion. These short scenes quickly give way to the rich, concluding scene of All’s Well That Ends Well and the final test of whether the play’s axiomatic title is valid or not. After the King expresses sadness over Helena’s death, he tells Bertram to “forget her” and to embrace a second marriage between Bertram and Lafeu’s daughter. Though this is presented joyously, the audience must surely be uncomfortable with the King’s rashness here, if not by Bertram’s apparent concession to this marriage. A letter arrives from Diana, and the King reads it aloud. In it, she reports that she was seduced by Bertram and that he promised to marry her on Helena’s death. She has come to hold Bertram to his word. In light of this, Lafeu withdraws the marriage arrangement and the King, suspecting that Bertram may have had something to do with Helena’s death, arrests him. Diana is able to prove, with the help of Parolles’s testimony, that Bertram had indeed seduced her and given her a ring. But Diana also notes that she gave Bertram a ring, too, and the King becomes suspicious once he discovers that it is the ring he had given to Helena. As he tries to question Diana about the matter, her answers veer into riddles taken by the King as nonsense and deliberate mischief. Just as the King orders for Diana to be arrested also, Helena enters and provides the “answer” to all of Diana’s riddles and the court’s questions. Bluntly, Helena tells Bertram that she has met the demands of his earlier challenge, and he is now “doubly won,” married to her and then outwitted and defeated by her. Bertram’s


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response to this is notoriously open to interpretation: “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly I’ll love her dearly, ever ever dearly” (5.3.312). It is difficult if not impossible to take these lines at face value. The final lines of the play witness the King offering Diana a choice of husband as her “reward.” The dense exchanges provide an apt if somewhat mystifying conclusion to a perplexing and puzzlingly original play.


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LIST OF CHARACTERS IN ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL q

Countess of Roussillon: Mother of Bertram and aide to Helena. Her devotion to Helena distinguishes her as an unusual dramatic creation, one who actively supports the marriage of her son to a girl of lower rank. As many critics have observed, we expect parents in such a position to assume a “blocking” role and become an obstacle for the lovers to overcome, rather than encouraging their union. Bertram: Count of Roussillon and, following his father’s death, ward of the King. Most notably, he is defined by his function as the object of Helena’s irrepressible affections. Interpretations of Bertram range from casting him as an out-and-out scoundrel to viewing him as a complex psychological study of the desires and needs of the masculine psyche. He is, despite expressing physical and romantic desire in the play, in many ways emasculated by Helena and his overall portrayal by Shakespeare. Helena: A fascinating portrait by Shakespeare, Helena (sometimes referred to as Helen) shuns the ideals of early modern femininity—chastity, obedience, and silence—in favor of self-reliance and an active engagement of her own life and destiny. However, despite the unusual and unstereotypical female presence she represents in the play, her independence, wit, and spirit are all summoned to enact a single purpose: to get married to a man (and not an admirable one at that). Lavatch: The Countess’s clown, Lavatch primarily functions to give voice to the darker and uglier aspects of sexuality and marriage. Reynaldo: A servant to the Countess. Parolles: Bertram’s companion and a “braggart soldier” figure, a common dramatic type with ancient roots, characterized by cowardice matched with exaggeration and swagger. Some critics speculate that the primary function of Parolles is to act as a kind of “moral sponge,” absorbing blame that would otherwise be directed at Helena and particularly at Bertram. 13


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King of France: Although he begins the play on the verge of death, the King is restored to health by Helena, a development that creates the dramatic space and license for Helena’s authority in the play. He is vital to the play’s narrative, then, because without him Helena, as a socially inferior woman, would have no hope of forcing Bertram to yield. As many critics have suggested, his early and unlikely recovery also imbues the work with elements of the romance genre and introduces themes of miracle and magic that would be developed more fully in Shakespeare’s remaining plays. Lafeu: An older member of the court and a steady, ethical presence in a play filled with moral ambiguity. First and Second Lords Dumaine: Bertram’s fellow soldiers, they are instrumental in the gulling of Parolles. By revealing Parolles as a coward and traitor to Bertram, the pair hope they can improve the young Count’s moral bearing. Interpreter: Another character instrumental in exposing Parolles during his “interrogation” scene. The Interpreter’s presence suggests the ways language can deceive and meaning can be altered. The Duke of Florence: Leader of the Florentine forces to which Bertram and the other young French nobles flee in search of war and glory. Widow: Mother of Diana, the Widow occupies a potentially dubious position in the play. She volunteers her daughter to Helena and speaks of righteousness but also, and most troublingly, takes money for her daughter’s services. Although Diana’s role is as bait in the bed-trick, the entire episode bears echoes of prostitution that are potentially intentional on Shakespeare’s part. Diana: Primarily characterized by her chastity, Diana’s obedience and passivity mark her as an orthodox alternative to Helena’s subversive agency. However, some critics have carefully articulated psychoanalytic theories of interconnection between Diana and Helena, examining how they come together in the bed-trick to form one “super-woman,” comprised of otherwise incompatible paradoxes such as action and submissiveness, sexuality and chastity. For all her idealized goodness, though, because of her participation in the bed-trick and her curiously devious performance at the close of the play, Diana has not been spared the moral censure meted out over the centuries to almost every character in the play. Mariana: Appears briefly as a friend to the Widow and dispenses advice to Diana, warning the pair of Bertram’s unseemly intentions toward Diana.


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KEY PASSAGES IN ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL q

Act 1, 1, 199–212 Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. What power is it which mounts my love so high, That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye? The mightiest space in fortune nature brings To join like likes and kiss like native things. Impossible be strange attempts to those That weigh their pains in sense and do suppose What hath been cannot be: who ever strove So show her merit, that did miss her love? The king’s disease—my project may deceive me, But my intents are fix’d and will not leave me. This is a radical speech for an early modern heroine. Helena asserts herself here as the play’s protagonist, as its engine and director. Moreover, the object of her desires and plans is Bertram, a man who will assume the traditional woman’s role of passivity while Helena pursues him relentlessly. We have seen strong women before in Shakespearean comedy (Rosalind and Portia, in particular), but they have donned men’s clothes in order to exert temporarily their power. Arguably, in gender terms, Helena resembles Lady Macbeth, a woman who calls on the spirits to strip her of feminine qualities so she can murder like a man, more than her comedic protagonist counterparts. Another useful analogy might be Petruccio, the hypermasculine suitor who plots Kate’s total submission in The Taming of the Shrew. Though the means of Helena and Petruccio may be different—despite both of them specializing in psychological shock tactics—their ends are the same. When Helena claims that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven,” boldly asserting that she must be an active agent in her own fate, we are reminded of the contrast with Twelfth 15


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Night’s Viola, another cross-dressing Shakespearean heroine but one who nonetheless expresses orthodox, expected sentiments when she says that only time, and not her agency, can determine what will happen in the complicated web of plot surrounding her. As Helena’s speech continues, however, we see that not only will she act, but that she is in a sense opposing and defying nature “That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye.” After addressing the plot elements involving the curing of the King, the striking focus and determination that begins the speech returns in the final lines: “But my intents are fix’d and will not leave me.” As is evident in much of the criticism collected in this volume, these chords of dominance and self-assertion have rarely resonated favorably until the middle of the twentieth century.

Act 1, 2, 24–48 I would I had that corporal soundness now, As when thy father and myself in friendship First tried our soldiership! He did look far Into the service of the time and was Discipled of the bravest: he lasted long; But on us both did haggish age steal on And wore us out of act. It much repairs me To talk of your good father. In his youth He had the wit which I can well observe To-day in our young lords; but they may jest Till their own scorn return to them unnoted Ere they can hide their levity in honour; So like a courtier, contempt nor bitterness Were in his pride or sharpness; if they were, His equal had awaked them, and his honour, Clock to itself, knew the true minute when Exception bid him speak, and at this time His tongue obey’d his hand: who were below him He used as creatures of another place And bow’d his eminent top to their low ranks, Making them proud of his humility, In their poor praise he humbled. Such a man Might be a copy to these younger times; Which, follow’d well, would demonstrate them now But goers backward. This melancholy passage shows the King in the grip of illness and nostalgia, as he faces imminent death and reflects on the past. Bertram’s late father was a close friend, “But on us both did haggish age steal on / And wore us out of act.”


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This sober line is just part of an extensive pattern of imagery in the opening scenes devoted to death and the inevitable passage of time, a theme of pressing importance in the last phase of Shakespeare’s career. The King’s speech, it is important to note, does not merely dwell on his own physical deterioration but rather expands its scope, branching out into a general sense of decline. Bertram, apparently imbued with the opposite of his father’s nobility, along with the foolish Parolles, are at the core of this new state of affairs. The King’s restoration soon after this passage may appear to undercut the wistful tone of the play’s opening act, but instead the play simply encourages us to view varying states and types of existence as different kinds of death. This early envisioning of death and time, after all, leads to Helena’s feigned death and Betram’s deathlike resignation to a suffocating entrapment.

Act 5, 3, 293–301 The jeweller that owes the ring is sent for, And he shall surety me. But for this lord, Who hath abused me, as he knows himself, Though yet he never harm’d me, here I quit him: He knows himself my bed he hath defiled; And at that time he got his wife with child: Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick: So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick: And now behold the meaning. Here is yet another moment in the play in which Shakespeare seems fascinated with death, dallying with it playfully but grimly as well. Moreover, we are presented with an additional example of the play’s preoccupation with riddles, both at the particular level of specific conundrums, such as this one, and at the general level of the play itself, a puzzle that presents many interpretive challenges. The central importance of this passage, though, is not simply that it summons images and ideas of death at the moment that a comedy should be resolving obstacles and reconciling doubts, but that it merges these deathly ingredients with the actual building blocks of comedy: love, sex, and reproduction. These elements are brought together brilliantly and disturbingly in Diana’s riddle: “Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick.” Despite her promise, however, that the riddle’s meaning is about to materialize, Helena’s appearance merely changes the terms of Diana’s riddle rather than solving it. The indeterminacy then shifts from Helena to Bertram in the final moments of the play.

Act 5, 3, 306–30 Helena: O my good lord, when I was like this maid, I found you wondrous kind. There is your ring;


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And, look you, here’s your letter; this it says: ‘When from my finger you can get this ring And are by me with child,’ & c. This is done: Will you be mine, now you are doubly won? Bertram: If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly. Helena: If it appear not plain and prove untrue, Deadly divorce step between me and you! O my dear mother, do I see you living? . . . King: Let us from point to point this story know, To make the even truth in pleasure flow. [to Diana] If thou be’st yet a fresh uncropped flower, Choose thou thy husband, and I’ll pay thy dower; For I can guess that by thy honest aid Thou keep’st a wife herself, thyself a maid. Of that and all the progress, more or less, Resolvedly more leisure shall express: All yet seems well; and if it end so meet, The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet. This is one of the most fascinating resolutions to a Shakespeare play. It upends and proves false the adage that “all’s well that ends well.” Here, all ends well, but still all is not well. Everything that should occur to constitute a comic ending takes place, yet the resolution is far from happy. This is the final puzzle or interpretive riddle of the play: How can all end well and not be well? The answer lies in the gap between form and content, letter and spirit. As Helena reveals the extent of her victory, Bertram’s words offer a powerful example of loaded speech and buried resistance: “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.” Many critics draw attention to the opening “if ” of the line, a qualifier that catches the hesitant and uncertain spirit of the play’s conclusion. Throughout these final passages, the use of “if ” and “seem” destabilizes the foundations of the resolution—nothing is clear or certain. How might an actor deliver the phrase “love her dearly, ever, ever, dearly”? With resignation or bitterness? With sadness and with an exhausted sigh on the final “ever”? There are many possibilities, but it is almost impossible to imagine an actor in a modern production delivering the sentiment literally, as a sincere pledge made by a humbled young man. After all, against his will, Betram has been trapped, defeated, “doubly won.” The final scene does not seem to be a particularly happy ending for Bertram; but the play does not


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Key Passages in All’s Well That Ends Well

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appear to resolve in a happy ending for Helena, either. From the perspective of a modern audience, Helena’s prospects of happiness seem deluded, utterly impossible. The marriage solidified here is surely a toxic mix of resentment and pretense, hostility and deception. The sense of cynicism that informs this final scene is not fully resolved, however. The King’s final speech is tainted with uncertainty. He pledges that Diana should choose a husband—repeating with remarkable arrogance and ignorance the misguided gesture that led to the play’s tragedies. Then, curiously giving this fl ippant gift to Diana, the King maintains some sense of the ambiguity surrounding Bertram and Helena: “All yet seems well; and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.” Shakespeare concludes with a “seem” and an “if,” one final reminder of the riddlelike nature of All’s Well That Ends Well and its refusal to give up clear or discernible answers in suggesting its characters’ fates.


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CRITICISM THROUGH THE AGES

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ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY q

Although likely written well into the second half of Shakespeare’s career (about 1604), there is no record of All’s Well That Ends Well being performed until the middle of the eighteenth century. Critics speculate, then, on the intellectual origins of the play and Shakespeare’s intentions for it. Was it, as some have suggested, an experimental piece not written for the stage? Was it Shakespeare’s intention that it not be produced, or did his colleagues balk at such an unconventional piece of theatre? Shakespeare would most likely be fascinated by the critical reception and trajectory of this strange and wonderful play. It is, after all, critics who shaped the play as a failure for centuries, and, at last, a later generation of commentators who “rescued” the play in the twentieth century. But when the fi rst critics who appear in this volume were writing, such a critical salvaging of All’s Well That Ends Well might have seemed unfathomable. Broadly speaking, they were convinced that the play was unsuccessful, even offensive or ugly, and that that the reasons for its failure lay primarily in Shakespeare’s inexplicably and prominently featuring such morally unattractive characters. The puzzles and ambiguities of the play so seductive to modern critics, such as the portrayal of transgressive gender roles or the undercutting of generic societal norms, were viewed as flaws by most eighteenth-century readers, mistakes uncharacteristic of the great Shakespeare. Charlotte Lennox, for example, the first critic cited in this volume, believes that Shakespeare was wrong to give Bertram and Helena a happy ending “when they both (with some inequality) merited nothing but punishment.” Modern readers, however, might argue that, rather than being a mistake, such a resolution was Shakespeare’s point and intention. The marriage of Bertram and Helena is a punishment, not a happy ending, and it is a complex authorial challenge to readers demanding a complex critical response. The only critic to write benignly about the play in the eighteenth century is Elizabeth Griffith, a critic who is able to find unlikely evidence of moral rectitude in All’s Well primarily by ignoring the difficult and unorthodox parts of the play. She is representative, nonetheless, of the critical current of her time, in

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focusing on moral readings of All’s Well, no matter how atypical she may be in her generosity to the play.

1753—Charlotte Lennox. From Shakespeare Illustrated Lennox (c. 1727–1804) wrote novels, poems, plays, and criticism. Her best-known and most celebrated novel, The Female Quixote (1752), was written around the same time she published the study of Shakespeare’s relation to his sources extracted here. In this section comparing All’s Well That Ends Well to its source narrative in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Lennox vigorously critiques Shakespeare’s adaptation. The playwright’s transformation of Helena and Bertram draw particular fire.

Shakespeare, in his comedy All’s Well That Ends Well, has followed pretty exactly the thread of the story in the foregoing novel. He has made use of all the incidents he found there, and added some of his own, which possibly may not be thought any proofs either of his invention or judgment, since, at the same time as they grow out of those he found formed to hand, yet they grow like excrescences, and are equally useless and disagreeable. . . . After [Helena] has thus exposed the frailties of her husband [in the play’s final scene], she has the cruelty to suffer him to be accused of having murdered her, and in consequence of that accusation, seized and imprisoned by the King’s order. The discovery of her plot is attended with none of those affecting circumstances we find in the original. After having made him endure so much shame and affliction, she haughtily demands his affection as a prize she had lawfully won. In Boccaccio she kneels, she weeps, she persuades; and if she demands, she demands with humility. In Shakespeare she is cruel, artful and insolent, and ready to make use of the King’s authority to force her husband to do her justice. . . . The Count suffers rather more in [Shakespeare’s] hands than the lady; in the novel his greatest fault is flying from a woman he had married, and taking a resolution never to live with her, but upon conditions he himself was determined to render impossible. Yet this behavior admits of much extenuation: the woman he had married was forced upon him by the absolute authority of the King; her birth was greatly inferior to his; her person had not attracted his attention; he had no inducement to love her; on the contrary, he had great reason to be offended with her forcing herself, ungenerously as he thought, upon him. . . .


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In Shakespeare, when the king offers her to him for a wife, he refuses her with great coarseness and many contemptuous expressions; yet upon the King’s exerting his authority, meanly submits, and contradicts his former avowed sentiments. After his marriage, he declares his continued hatred for her to his friends, yet condescends to dissemble unworthily with her to get rid of her. In Florence he attempts to corrupt a young woman of good family and reputation, and succeeding as he imagined, openly boasts of it. Upon the news of his wife’s death, of which he thinks himself the cause, he expresses great joy; and without taking leave of the young woman he supposes he has debauched, hastens back to Roussillon. There a marriage being proposed to him with the daughter of an old courtier, he accepts it immediately; declaring his passion for that young lady, which he durst never reveal, was the cause of his hatred to Helena. A very improbable tale; because his quality set him above a refusal from any Lady; and he is represented to be passionately in love at Florence. . . . It is not easy to conceive a reason why Shakespeare has thus mangled the characters of Boccaccio; when, except in a few trifling circumstances, he has so faithfully followed the story. It was not necessary to make Helena less amiable, or the count more wicked in the play than the novel; since the intrigue in both is exactly the same; and certainly he has violated all the rules of poetical justice in conducting, by a variety of incidents, the two principal persons of the play to happiness; when they both (with some inequality) merited nothing but punishment.

QQQ 1765—Samuel Johnson. All’s Well That Ends Well (notes), from The Plays of William Shakespeare Johnson (1709–1784) is one of the most celebrated English critics. His enormous catalog of achievements includes his many lasting and influential insights into Shakespeare’s work. This brief reflection on All’s Well That Ends Well once again shows how much difficulty the characterization of Bertram and Helena (here referred to as Helen) caused for eighteenth-century readers, though his assessment is somewhat more generous than we find from many of Johnson’s contemporaries.

This play has many delightful scenes, though not sufficiently probable, and some happy characters, though not new, nor produced by any deep knowledge of human nature. Parolles is a boaster and a coward, such as has always been the sport of the stage, but perhaps never raised more laughter or contempt than in the hands of Shakespeare.


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I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness. The story of Betram and Diana had been told before of Mariana and Angelo, and, to confess the truth, scarcely merited to be heard a second time.

QQQ 1775—Elizabeth Griffith. From The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Griffith (ca.1720–93) is a curious and fascinating critic. She takes to the extreme the eighteenth-century passion for moral interpretations of literature by devoting an entire volume to the moral wisdom found in Shakespeare’s plays. The following passages focus on Helena. The first refers to her speech “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie . . .” (1.1.199) and the second to Helena’s “Poor lord, is’t I / That chase thee from thy country . . .” (3.2.102–03). Note that Griffith’s sentiments are unusually benign representations of Helena’s virtues but also that Griffith appears to employ some telling sleight of hand with gender in her use of “men” and “manly.”

There are some excellent well-spirited reflections here thrown out, to encourage men in the exertion of all their active faculties towards the advancement of their fortunes; and to earn their independence by the manly means of industry, instead of poorly crouching at the gates of Providence, whining for an alms. Helena, upon her resolving to undertake the cure of the king’s disorder, in hopes through that means to raise her rank and fortune to a respect not unworthy of Bertram. . . . When Bertram, whom the king had compelled to espouse Helena, flies from France to avoid any further connection with her, and had engaged in the Tuscan war, her mourning and reflections upon that occasion, are extremely moving and tender; particularly in her manner of accusing herself with having been the cause of all his perils.

QQQ 1777—Maurice Morgann. From An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff


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Morgann (1726–1802) was a man of letters perhaps best remembered for this extended study of the Shakespearean character Falstaff. The following excerpt is taken from that work and in part reveals the eighteenth-century interest in Parolles. Here, the braggart soldier is compared unfavorably to Falstaff.

I am to avow then, that I do not clearly discern that Sir John Falstaff deserves to bear the character so generally given him of an absolute coward; or, in other words, that I do not conceive Shakespeare ever meant to make cowardice an essential part of his constitution. . . . In the meanwhile, it may not perhaps be easy for him to resolve how it comes about, that, whilst we look upon Falstaff as a character of the like nature with that of Parolles or Bobadil, we should preserve for him a great degree of respect and good-will, and yet feel the highest disdain and contempt of the others, tho’ they are all involved in similar situations. The reader, I believe, would wonder extremely to find either Parolles or Bobadil posses himself in danger: What then can be the cause that we are not at all surprised at the gaiety and ease of Falstaff under the most trying of circumstances; and that we never think of charging Shakespeare with departing, on this account, from the truth and coherence of the character?


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ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY q

After a cold critical reception in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century’s response to the play can be characterized as a little more forgiving and, eventually, more rigorous in nature. This somewhat altered course does not mean that the play experienced an actual revival of any kind or was broadly viewed as a successfully realized work. Rather, individual and often brilliant voices attempted to address a critical imbalance throughout the century. The romantics, as can be seen in the selections from Hazlitt and Coleridge included in this section, seem to have been uncommonly generous in their treatment of the play, possibly because there was a sense of romantic radicalism in the idea of embracing such an unfavorably viewed work. Certainly such a motivation can be seen as guiding Coleridge’s sympathetic appraisal of Bertram’s behavior in the face of the King’s “tyrannical act” of forcing marriage on the young count. By midcentury, Charles Cowden Clarke writes an account of Helena’s mind and motivations unprecedented in its detail. Several decades later at the century’s close, Frederick S. Boas also wrestles with the complexity of the play, this time urging readers to look at the work’s genre and form rather than its morality as a means of characterizing the play. His categorization of All’s Well That Ends Well as a problem play has helped shape critical debate about it ever since. These advances were made, of course, alongside continuing declarations and assertions of the play’s limits. Such voices are represented here by Thomas Kenny’s critiques of the play’s art.

1817—William Hazlitt. From Characters of Shakespear’s Plays Hazlitt (1778–1830) was a preeminent literary critic of his age. Here, his assessment of All’s Well That Ends Well is generous, lightly challenging even common moral objections to the play and Helena’s character. Notably, Hazlitt has little to say of Bertram other than that he is “admirably described.” 29


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All’s Well that Ends Well is one of the most pleasing of our author’s comedies. The interest is however more of a serious than of a comic nature. The character of Helen is one of great sweetness and delicacy. She is placed in circumstances of the most critical kind, and has to court her husband both as a virgin and a wife: yet the most scrupulous nicety of female modesty is not once violated. There is not one thought or action that ought to bring a blush into her cheeks, or that for a moment lessens her in our esteem. Perhaps the romantic attachment of a beautiful and virtuous girl to one placed above her hopes by the circumstances of birth and fortune, was never so exquisitely expressed as in the reflections which she utters when young Roussillon leaves his mother’s house, under whose protection she has been brought up with him, to repair to the French king’s court. ‘Helena. Oh, were that all—I think not on my father, And these great tears grace his remembrance more Than those I shed for him. What was he like? I have forgot him. My imagination Carries no favour in it, but Bertram’s. I am undone, there is no living, none If Bertram be away. It were all one That I should love a bright particular star, And think to wed it; he is so above me: In his bright radiance and collateral light Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. Th’ ambition in my love thus plagues itself; The hind that would be mated by the lion, Must die for love. ’Twas pretty, tho’ a plague, To see him every hour, to sit and draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls In our heart’s table: heart too capable Of every line and trick of his sweet favour. But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy Must sanctify his relics.’ The interest excited by this beautiful picture of a fond and innocent heart is kept up afterwards by her resolution to follow him to France, the success of her experiment in restoring the king’s health, her demanding Bertram in marriage as a recompense, his leaving her in disdain, her interview with him afterwards disguised as Diana, a young lady whom he importunes with his secret addresses, and their final reconciliation when the consequences of her stratagem and the proofs of her love are fully made known. The persevering gratitude of the French king to his benefactress, who cures him of a languishing distemper by


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a prescription hereditary in her family, the indulgent kindness of the Countess, whose pride of birth yields, almost without a struggle, to her affection for Helen, the honesty and uprightness of the good old lord Lafeu, make very interesting parts of the picture. The wilful stubbornness and youthful petulance of Bertram are also very admirably described. The comic part of the play turns on the folly, boasting, and cowardice of Parolles, a parasite and hanger-on of Bertram’s, the detection of whose false pretensions to bravery and honour forms a very amusing episode. He is first found out by the old lord Lafeu, who says, ‘The soul of this man is in his clothes’; and it is proved afterwards that his heart is in his tongue, and that both are false and hollow. The adventure of ‘the bringing off of his drum’ has become proverbial as a satire on all ridiculous and blustering undertakings which the person never means to perform: nor can any thing be more severe than what one of the bye-standers remarks upon what Parolles says of himself, ‘Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?’ Yet Parolles himself gives the best solution of the difficulty afterwards when he is thankful to escape with his life and the loss of character; for, so that he can live on, he is by no means squeamish about the loss of pretensions, to which he had sense enough to know he had no real claim, and which he had assumed only as a means to live. ‘Parolles. Yet I am thankful: if my heart were great, ’Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more, But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft As captain shall. Simply the thing I am Shall make me live: who knows himself a braggart, Let him fear this; for it shall come to pass, That every braggart shall be found an ass. Rust sword, cool blushes, and Parolles live Safest in shame; being fool’d, by fool’ry thrive; There’s place and means for every man alive. I’ll after them.’ The story of All’s Well that Ends Well, and of several others of Shakespear’s plays, is taken from Boccacio. The poet has dramatised the original novel with great skill and comic spirit, and has preserved all the beauty of character and sentiment without improving upon it, which was impossible. There is indeed in Boccacio’s serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is hardly to be met with in any other prose writer whatever. Justice has not been done him by the world. He has in general passed for a mere narrator of lascivious tales or idle jests. This character probably originated in his obnoxious attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the grossness of mankind, who revenged their own want of refinement on Boccacio, and only saw in his writings what suited the coarseness of their own tastes. But the truth


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is, that he has carried sentiment of every kind to its very highest purity and perfection. By sentiment we would here understand the habitual workings of some one powerful feeling, where the heart reposes almost entirely upon itself, without the violent excitement of opposing duties or untoward circumstances. In this way, nothing ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi and his Falcon. The perseverance in attachment, the spirit of gallantry and generosity displayed in it, has no parallel in the history of heroical sacrifices. The feeling is so unconscious too, and involuntary, is brought out in such small, unlooked-for, and unostentatious circumstances, as to show it to have been woven into the very nature and soul of the author. The story of Isabella is scarcely less fine, and is more affecting in the circumstances and in the catastrophe. Dryden has done justice to the impassioned eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda; but has not given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest of the story of Honoria. Cimon and Iphigene is by no means one of the best, notwithstanding the popularity of the subject. The proof of unalterable affection given in the story of Jeronymo, and the simple touches of nature and picturesque beauty in the story of the two holiday lovers, who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf in the garden at Florence, are perfect master-pieces. The epithet of Divine was well bestowed on this great painter of the human heart. The invention implied in his different tales is immense: but we are not to infer that it is all his own. He probably availed himself of all the common traditions which were floating in his time, and which he was the first to appropriate. Homer appears the most original of all authors—probably for no other reason than that we can trace the plagiarism no farther. Boccacio has furnished subjects to numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative. The story of Griselda is borrowed from his Decameron by Chaucer; as is the Knight’s Tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of the Theseid.

QQQ 1833—Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From Table-Talk Coleridge (1772–1834) is a major figure of British romanticism whose best-known poems include The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. Coleridge’s critical work on Shakespeare is lively and revealing, as the following character sketch of Bertram reveals. The comments on Helena here seem to contradict a notorious and often-cited remark made by Coleridge elsewhere that Helena was the “loveliest” of Shakespeare’s characters.

I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well. He was a young nobleman in feudal times,


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just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth, and appetite for pleasure and liberty, natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course, he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependent in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other respects, Bertram was necessarily in great measure ignorant. And, after all, her prima facie merit was the having inherited a prescription from her old father the doctor, by which she cures the king—a merit which supposes an extravagance of personal loyalty in Bertram to make conclusive to him in such a matter as that of taking a wife. Bertram had surely good reason to look upon the king’s forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakespeare’s consummate skill to interest us for her. And she does this chiefly by the operation of the other characters, the Countess, Lafeu, etc. We get to like Helena from their praising and commending her so much.

QQQ 1846—A. W. Schlegel. From Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature Schlegel (1767–1845), the German romantic poet and thinker, gained his intimate knowledge of Shakespeare by translating the playwright’s works into his native language. His Lectures provide keen insight into the plays. The following excerpt on All’s Well That Ends Well, for example, begins by grouping the play with other, similar Shakespeare works, anticipating Boas’s “problem plays” categorization at the end of the century. Schlegel, over all, is warmly sympathetic to the play.

All’s Well that Ends Well, Much Ado about Nothing, Measure for Measure, and The Merchant of Venice, bear, in so far, a resemblance to each other, that, along with the main plot, which turns on important relations decisive of nothing less than the happiness or misery of life, and therefore is calculated to make a powerful impression on the moral feeling, the poet, with the skill of a practised artist, has contrived to combine a number of cheerful accompaniments. Not, however, that the poet seems loth to allow full scope to the serious impressions: he merely adds a due counterpoise to them in the entertainment which he supplies for the imagination and the understanding. He has furnished the story with all the separate features which are necessary to give to it the appearance of a real, though extraordinary, event. But he never falls into the lachrymose tone of the sentimental drama, nor into the bitterness of those dramas which have a moral direction, and which are really nothing but moral invectives


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dramatized. Compassion, anxiety, and dissatisfaction become too oppressive when they are too long dwelt on, and when the whole of a work is given up to them exclusively. Shakspeare always finds means to transport us from the confinement of social institutions or pretensions, where men do but shut out the light and air from each other, into the open space, even before we ourselves are conscious of our want. All’s Well that Ends Well is the old story of a young maiden whose love looked much higher than her station. She obtains her lover in marriage from the hand of the King as a reward for curing him of a hopeless and lingering disease, by means of a hereditary arcanum of her father, who had been in his lifetime a celebrated physician. The young man despises her virtue and beauty; concludes the marriage only in appearance, and seeks in the dangers of war, deliverance from a domestic happiness which wounds his pride. By faithful endurance and an innocent fraud, she fulfils the apparently impossible conditions on which the Count had promised to acknowledge her as his wife. Love appears here in humble guise: the wooing is on the woman’s side; it is striving, unaided by a reciprocal inclination, to overcome the prejudices of birth. But as soon as Helena is united to the Count by a sacred bond, though by him considered an oppressive chain, her error becomes her virtue.—She affects us by her patient suffering: the moment in which she appears to most advantage is when she accuses herself as the persecutor of her inflexible husband, and, under the pretext of a pilgrimage to atone for her error, privately leaves the house of her mother-in-law. Johnson expresses a cordial aversion for Count Bertram, and regrets that he should be allowed to come off at last with no other punishment than a temporary shame, nay, even be rewarded with the unmerited possession of a virtuous wife. But has Shakspeare ever attempted to soften the impression made by his unfeeling pride and light-hearted perversity? He has but given him the good qualities of a soldier. And does not the poet paint the true way of the world, which never makes much of man’s injustice to woman, if so-called family honour is preserved? Bertram’s sole justification is, that by the exercise of arbitrary power, the King thought proper to constrain him, in a matter of such delicacy and private right as the choice of a wife. Besides, this story, as well as that of Grissel and many similar ones, is intended to prove that woman’s truth and patience will at last triumph over man’s abuse of his superior power, while other novels and fabliaux are, on the other hand, true satires on woman’s inconsistency and cunning. In this piece old age is painted with rare favour: the plain honesty of the King, the good-natured impetuosity of old Lafeu, the maternal indulgence of the Countess to Helena’s passion for her son, seem all as it were to vie with each other in endeavours to overcome the arrogance of the young Count. The style of the whole is more sententious than imaginative: the glowing colours of fancy could not with propriety have been employed on such a subject. In the passages where the humiliating rejection of the poor Helena is most painfully affecting,


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the cowardly Parolles steps in to the relief of the spectator. The mystification by which his pretended valour and his shameless slanders are unmasked must be ranked among the most comic scenes that ever were invented: they contain matter enough for an excellent comedy, if Shakspeare were not always rich even to profusion. Falstaff has thrown Parolles into the shade, otherwise among the poet’s comic characters he would have been still more famous.

QQQ 1863—Charles Cowden Clarke. From Shakespeare-Characters, Chiefly Those Subordinate Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877) was primarily a Shakespearean scholar, though his published work addressed a variety of authors and subjects. He also wrote and published poetry. The following lengthy selection is significant and included in its entirety for several reasons. First and most importantly, Cowden Clarke offers the most detailed account yet of Helena, producing a comparatively complex appraisal of her psyche and character. He makes no secret of the fact that he plans to “rescue” Helena from her moral critics and, in doing so, his arguments border on feminist in places. In particular, he traces the near uniform critical disdain of Helena to a particular inability among critics to recognize that women can be both gentle and strong. As often happens when critics strongly favor either Bertram or Helena, though, the other character is denigrated. Here, Cowden Clarke is delightfully angry in his condemnation of Bertram as “a dirty dog” born of “sewage water.” The second reason why this selection is included in its entirety is that it is an attempt to correct an obvious imbalance in this volume and in criticism of the play in general. Much critical attention has, by necessity, been given to the two leads of the play, but Cowden Clarke’s project in Shakespeare-Characters is to give due consideration to Shakespeare’s minor personages. (The inclusion of Bertram and Helena in such a work reveals, as Cowden Clarke argues, the marginal status of the play at this time). There is, then, a welcome treatment here of Lafeu, the two lords who gull Parolles, and others.

The story or plot of “All’s Well that Ends Well” is one of the most interesting of Shakespeare’s comedies. The main incident, which turns upon the circumstance of a young maiden becoming the wooing party, and claiming the royal prerogative to bestow upon her the hand of the man she is in love with, as a reward for the service she has rendered to her sovereign in administering to him a prescription


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hereditary in her family, and thereby restoring him from a painful distemper that the faculty had considered incurable; the circumstance, again, of the youth to whom she had attached herself being the son of the lady who had afforded her protection in her orphanhood, and who was her superior in point of rank; his yielding to the power of the king, and, although he wedded her, resolving never to fulfil the duties of a husband; his quitting her to follow the Florentine war; her tracing him in the disguise of a pilgrim, and succeeding in winning the confidence and friendly offices of the young maiden, Diana, whom he has attempted to seduce, and who is the sole means of causing him to render justice to his discarded wife, is all brought about with a force of ingenuity, and delicacy of feeling, that are perfectly admirable. The character of the heroine, Helena, is one of rare sweetness, blended with high romantic fervour. She is placed in the singularly critical position of courting her husband, both as a maiden and a wife; and the glorious testimony to the transparent beauty of virtue is fully borne out, and a triumph achieved, by her not committing one single violation of the laws of the most scrupulous modesty. I must take leave to say a few words in behalf, and, I hope, in justification of Helena, whose principle of action appears to have been wonderfully mistaken, and whose mental structure to have been—I will not say, unappreciated, but not even recognised by the general reader. Of all Shakespeare’s heroines, it strikes me that Helena is the one that is most philosophical, both in temperament and in speech and conduct. When I say “philosophical in temperament,” I do not mean that she is either stoical or resigned. She is the very reverse of either. But she is reflective, she is observant, and she is essentially remedial. An apparently hopeless passion has taught her reflection, introspection, and humility of spirit. It has taught her to think conscientiously, to reason justly, to weigh her own and others’ claims carefully. She has discernment, and she has warmth of heart: the first teaching her to perceive accurately, the latter impelling her to decide generously. She, therefore, estimates herself and her own value at modest rate, while to Bertram she awards all the superiority that loving worship takes delight in imputing to its chosen idol. But at the same time that Helena’s affection prompts her to overrate the man she loves, and to underrate herself, her disposition will not let her sink beneath the sense of disparity. Her own character will not let her do this; for, besides its diffidence of self, it possesses uncommon self-reliance and moral courage,—a combination less rare than is generally believed. Womanly gentleness and modesty, together with womanly firmness and fortitude, are far from incompatible; and in Helena of Narbonne they co-exist to a remarkable degree. The kind of gentleness which consists of mere prone and passive yieldingness, oftener degenerates into weakness, ending in obstinacy and slyness, than Helena’s kind of gentleness, which is self-modesty without self-distrust. She is conscious, to an acutely-sensitive degree, of her own inadequate pretensions; but she is also conscious—involuntarily conscious, as


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it were—of her own powers to win through patient trial, earnest attempt, and devoted endeavour. It is this that makes Helena’s philosophy so “remedial” a one. Ever ready to acknowledge her lack of personal merit, she is inwardly aware of a moral merit, that requires but time and opportunity to obtain for her that which her own simple attractions are unable to command. She does not feel herself formed to inspire regard, but she knows herself worthy to gain regard; and this she diligently and faithfully dedicates her whole thoughts and energies to achieve. Observe here with what mingled fervour and humility her loving thoughts clothe themselves in thoughtful words:— “’Tis pity, That wishing well had not a body in ’t, Which might be felt;—that we, the poorer born, Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes, Might with effects of them follow our friends, And show what we alone must think; which never Returns us thanks.” Helena, with the true courage born of a practical and remedial philosophy, is eager to find resources in her own sense of resolve. She says— “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.” She gathers confidence from inborn consciousness of steadfastness and ardour of perseverance, exclaiming— “Impossible be strange attempts to those That weigh their pains in sense; and do suppose What hath been cannot be. Who ever strove To show her merit that did miss her love?” The same characteristic earnestness, with faith in the philosophy of endeavour, marks the whole of her arguments with the king during the interview where she seeks to persuade him of the efficacy of her father’s medicine. She thus modestly, yet ardently, urges him to essay its effect— “What I can do, can do no hurt to try, Since you set up your rest ’gainst remedy. HE that of greatest works is finisher,


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Oft does them by the weakest minister. So holy writ in babes hath judgment shown, When judges have been babes. Great floods have flown From simple sources; and great seas have dried, When miracles have by the greatest been denied. Oft expectation fails; and most oft there, Where most it promises; and oft it hits Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.” This is perfectly the language of one accustomed to reason hopefully in the midst of discouragement, and to reap fruit for trust out of the most unpromising occurrences. Helena has a spirit of fervent reliance, the offspring of her very meekness and innocent humility. When the king waves her proffered help, she thus gently, yet warmly, meets his refusal. Her speech is at once femininely diffident and devoutly earnest:— “Inspired merit so by breath is barr’d. It is not so with HIM that all things knows, As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows: But most it is presumption in us, when The help of Heaven we count the act of men. Dear sir, to my endeavour give consent: Of Heaven, not me, make an experiment. I am not an impostor, that proclaim Myself against the level of mine aim; But know I think, and think I know most sure, My art is not past power, nor you past cure.” No wonder such eloquent persuasion succeeds in its desired effect upon her royal listener. He replies, “Art thou so confident? Within what space hop’st thou my cure?” And then Helena answers his words full of her characteristically humble, yet trustful spirit—rising into poetic beauty with her own mounting hope— “The greatest grace lending grace, Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring; Ere twice in murk and occidental damp Moist Hesperus hath quench’d his sleepy lamp, Or four-and-twenty times the pilot’s glass Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass; What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly; Health shall live free, and sickness freely die.”


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The essence of Helena’s philosophy, in its practical energy, which prefers deeds to speech, and its hopeful nature, ever looking to the possibility of good, as well as facing the existence of evil, is contained in those few words of hers where she interrupts something she was going to say, thus— “But with the word, the time will bring on summer; When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns, And be as sweet as sharp. We must away. Our waggon is prepar’d, and time revives us: All’s well that ends well. Still the fine’s the crown; Whate’er the course, the end is the renown.” Helena’s remedial philosophy supplies her with one invaluable resource— unflinching courage against disappointment. When on her journey homewards, hoping to meet the king at Marseilles, and, arriving there, finds him just gone, with what promptitude and cheerfulness she prepares to follow him. No time wasted in weak lamentation and regret, but active resolve and steady perseverance. This is precisely the kind of courage—moral courage—which women of Helena’s nature and philosophy possess. It is the noblest, the sublimest courage; and it is essentially feminine courage. Fortitude of spirit against discouragement—bravery of heart and mind amidst disappointment, disaster, and defeat—constitute womanly valour; and we see that the gentlest, at the same time the firmest, among women, are those most distinguished by this heroic attribute. So much for Helena’s philosophy. But Helena has been tacitly impeached, if not openly arraigned, of an unseemly forwardness in the proffer of herself and her affections. She has had high justice done her, it is true, at the hands of several critics: Coleridge calling her upon one occasion, “Shakespeare’s loveliest character;” Hazlitt saying, “She is placed in circumstances of the most critical kind, . . . yet the most scrupulous nicety of female modesty is not once violated;” Charles Lamb ascribing to her “the full lustre of the female character;” and lastly, one of her own sex, Mrs Jameson, in her “Characteristics of Women,” having written a noble vindication of her character and conduct. Yet still, there has been a prevailing feeling—an impression—that Helena is guilty of unfeminine want of delicacy and reserve in the manifestation of her passion for Bertram; and the very zeal of her defenders in pleading her cause, evinces the consciousness that such impression exists. How this impression has arisen, I think I can show. In the first place, Helena, as has been already said, is a remarkable union of moral force and courage, with gentleness and tenderness of heart; and there are many men who cannot believe in—nay, who cannot see—gentleness and softness in a woman’s nature, if it be accompanied with strength of character. There is a favourite cant phrase in Noodledom (as Sydney Smith calls the region of numskulls) about


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“strong-minded women,” which seems to preclude the possibility of strength in co-existence with gentleness of feeling and softness of manner. As “strongminded women” are frequently spoken of, one would think a “strong-minded” woman must necessarily have the figure of a horse-guard, the swag of a drayman, and the sensibility of a carcase-butcher. Helena, in her energy of purpose, in her quickness of intelligence to discern a means of fulfilling her object, and in her spirited pursuit of those means, may give the idea of unfeminine will and decision to those who confound passiveness with gentleness, helplessness with retiring delicacy, and incapacity with modesty; a confounding of qualities which characterises the opinion of one class of men, about women, of the present day. But to those who know how entirely consistent with unaffected diffidence of self, is the utmost heroism of self-devotion and self-exertion, in women distinguished by all their sex’s grace of person, sentiment, and behaviour, will perceive nothing but truest feminine beauty in all that Helena does. She has that absence of selfconceit, with reliance upon her sense of right, which abates no jot of modest feeling and demeanour, while it leads to the most courageous endeavour. No difficulty daunts her; because she has confidence in the motive which impels her, rather than in her own power to accomplish its ends,—a characteristic distinction deserving of notice. The modesty—with force—of her appeal, in the interview with the king, has been discussed: in all that regards her love, not only is she modest, but she is humble—that is, she has the modesty and humility of true passion; which takes pleasure in debasing its own estimate and pretensions, in exact proportion to its eagerness to exalt and deify the merits of the object beloved. Musing upon her passion for Bertram, she says— “It were all one That I should love a bright particular star, And think to wed it—he is so above me.” And nothing can surpass in modesty, with ardour of worship, her famous impelled confession to the Countess Roussillon; it is the very prodigality of loving humility and humble love:— “Then I confess Here on my knee, before high Heaven and you, That before you, and next unto high Heaven, I love your son: My friends were poor, but honest; so’s my love. Be not offended; for it hurts not him That he is lov’d of me: I follow him not By any token of presumptuous suit;


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Nor would I have him till I do deserve him, Yet never know how that desert should be. I know I love in vain, strive against hope; Yet in this captious and intenible sieve I still pour in the waters of my love, And lack not to lose still; thus, Indian-like, Religious in mine error, I adore The sun, that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more. My dearest madam, Let not your hate encounter with my love, For loving where you do; but, if yourself, Whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth, Did ever, in so true a flame of liking, Wish chastely, and love dearly, that your Dian Was both herself and love; oh! then, give pity To her, whose state is such, that cannot choose But lend and give, where she is sure to lose; That seeks not to find that her search implies; But, riddle-like, lives sweetly where she dies.” These last lines are in the perfect spirit of a self-sacrifice that characterises a genuine and modest love. Then, at the very moment when she attains the summit at which she has aimed and has the royal privilege to choose her husband—no triumph—no exultation—no welcoming of success marks her manner; but meekest words, and gentlest deference:— “I dare not say, I take you; but I give Me and my service, ever while I live, Into your yielding power.” And when this chosen husband bluntly and contemptuously rejects her, she relinquishes her claim; turning to the king, and saying— “That you are well restor’d, my lord, I am glad; Let the rest go.” The whole scene of their parting, when Bertram leaves her, (the 5th of the 2d Act,) is exhibited, as one writer only could have done, without descending into coarseness and over-painting, And, in the climax of the plot, she is not only justified in the scheme as regards herself personally, but she saves her husband from a dissolute act of profligacy; the almost natural consequence of a


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constrained wedlock—of a marriage into which the man is forced, against both will and inclination; and lastly, by its means, she protects the young maiden, Diana, from the lawless suit of a seducer, and preserves her virtue from the snare laid for it. And now I hope that I have rescued the severely-judged Helena from the charge of “forwardness” and “immodesty.” Certainly, a finer specimen of moral fortitude, with feminine true delicacy of sentiment, I do not think is to be found in all the Shakespeare gallery of heroines. But the story of “All’s Well that Ends Well” is a specimen of one of the curses of a feudal tyranny, where the dearest privileges, and dearest of earthly blessings—a free choice in marriage—was prostrate to the caprice of the sovereign: and Shakespeare has, with his ample and humane philosophy, manifested the folly, as well as injustice of that prerogative; and this may have been the reason why he has created so great a disproportion between the moral qualities of Helena and Bertram. Had they both been estimable persons, there could have been little scope for romance in the plot; it must per force have taken a commonplace character. Had she not been endowed with the highest qualities of devotion and virtuous principle,—or say, even had she betrayed a questionable purity,—he could at once (being the stronger party) have righted himself by a forcible separation. The incongruity of the law, therefore, was forcibly displayed, by his availing himself of the man’s conventional privilege of desertion, seeing that he could not bring his affections to respond to the disposing will of his feudal lord. This, therefore, again must be the reason why the poet has so laboured the character of his hero, in order that he might become a foil to the excellent Helena; and, moreover, we again recognise Shakespeare’s knowledge of the human heart, inasmuch as every day affords us testimonies of the extraordinary endurance, devotion, and attachment of women in the midst of repugnant qualities, and even of savage treatment; for Helena is conscious of, and proves the infidelity, with other disreputable propensities, of her husband. But Bertram is, really, a dirty dog—a thoroughly dirty dog: he is an aristocrat, not of the “first water,” but of the last—the lowest water—sewer-water. He has the pride of birth, with scarcely a virtue to give dignity to, and warrant that pride. He is weak in judgment; for he is the last to perceive the scoundrel character of the wretch Parolles. He is imperious and headstrong, treacherous, a liar, and a coward. One of the commentators (Dr Johnson, I think) denies that he is a coward, assuming that he must have distinguished himself in the Florentine war, since he received the favour of the duke; but I mean that he was a moral coward; as proof, there is scarcely a scene wherein he appears, (but more especially in the 3d of the last Act, when he infamously traduces the character of Diana,) that he does not exhibit himself a despicable, and even a loathsome coward. And this, forsooth, is a man for the pure and high-minded Helena to woo, and win, and think to convert into a respectable companion for life! But, indeed, we may find occasion for wonder at the matrimonial alliances


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concocted in more than one of Shakespeare’s dramas; in which it should seem, that if the woman were but legitimately united with the man, and according to ecclesiastical law, and was provided with an establishment for life, it was expected of her to become profoundly grateful and complacent, whatever may be the character, or have been the previous conduct of the man. In the feudal ages the women were scarcely a grade higher in the scale of creation than the live-stock on the estates: because they administered to the vanity and sensual gratification of their lords, these deigned to make a fuss with them, and talk prodigiously of the imperial dominion of ladies’ eyes and ladies’ favours; but they possessed no more real power than the selected female in a Mussulman’s harem: it remained for Shakespeare to assert in behalf of his sisterhood a claim to the higher endowments of intellectuality, with the most serenely beautiful of all the active virtues—those of loving-kindness, and steadfastness of heart. I judged it allowable to say thus over much, perhaps, of Bertram and Helena, although the principal characters in the play, because it is one not frequently turned to by the casual readers of the poet. To such, therefore, the foregoing remarks have been addressed; as, indeed, I may say I have done throughout these Dissertations. Another fact in this play, and in which Shakespeare marks his estimation of Bertram’s false aristocracy, (for nobility of birth and rank, without nobleness of nature, is a melancholy contradiction,) may be recognised in the foil that has been given to his character in that of the two young lords in their honest and hearty denunciation of his unchivalrous conduct in his amours. Their conversation about him is not tainted with envy on account of his prowess in the campaign, but it conveys a high-minded disgust at his heartless intrigues. The one young nobleman, after confiding to the other that Bertram hath “perverted a young gentlewoman of a most chaste renown,” and hath even given her his “monumental ring,”—that is, the family jewel,—follows up his detestation of the act by adding, in a fine spirit of philosophy, “We are merely our own traitors. And, as in the common course of all treasons, we still see them reveal themselves, till they attain to their abhorred ends; so he, that in this action contrives against his own nobility, in his proper stream o’erflows himself.” And immediately after, when it has been noticed that the war was over, and the one inquires whether Bertram will return to France, the other replies, “I perceive, by this demand, you are not altogether of his counsel.” To which the former retorts, “Let it be forbid, sir! So should I be a great deal of his act.” Then, again, when speaking of Bertram’s having received intelligence of the death of Helena, his wife, the second young lord sums up his cold-blooded nature in these tender words—“I am heartily sorry that he will be glad of this.” And he adds—“How mightily, sometimes, we make us comforts of our losses:” to which the other rejoins, “And how mightily, some other times, we drown our gain in tears. The great dignity that his valour hath here acquired for him, shall, at home, be encountered with a


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shame as ample.” And then comes the well-known golden reflection: “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.” It cannot be too often repeated, that some of the very finest of Shakespeare’s aphorisms are, as precious seed, scattered on the by-ways of his dramas; and this circumstance enforces the necessity that none but persons of imagination and quick feeling should presume to impersonate any of his characters; and yet more, that his plays never will be worthily represented till the theatrical professors are so imbued with that ambition for its best interests, that they shall consider a strenuous exertion to give the utmost effect to an inferior part allotted to them paramount to all squabbles and intrigues for the more prominent ones. The characters of these young lords, for instance, are capable of much development, and should be intrusted only to persons of pronounced refinement, both of mind and education. They are not mouthing young men, see-sawing the axioms of a college tutor, (which half our groundling actors would make of them,) but high and gallant spirits, ready to distinguish themselves in the romance of a warrior’s life, and incapable of a compromise, either of their own honour or that of another. This is the true “aristocracy” of human nature; and this is the lesson that Shakespeare intended for his audience, by placing them as contrasts to the young lord Bertram, who, at the time that he was insisting upon the dignity of his “order,” was soiling it by rascal vices and meanness. Who will say that this is not pure morality? Monsieur Lavatch, hereditary household jester to the counts of Rousillon, is a lively and pleasant fellow, with very strong touches of nationality about him. He has French quick-wittedness, French good temper, French good spirits, French light-heartedness; and, sooth to say, French light-headedness, in many points. He is light-minded, being inconsequent and uncontinuous, which is very French. He is light-mannered, being somewhat free in his talk, and frolic in his demeanour, very French also. He is light-moraled, loose-conscienced, fickle, and inconstant; and if these be not French characteristics, I have made a mistake. He thinks of marrying Isbel, the Countess’s waiting-woman, before he leaves Rousillon, but the gaieties of Paris, the fineries of the court, dazzle his weathercock fancy, and when he comes home he has “no mind to Isbel,” and coolly owns that the “brains of his Cupid are knocked out.” The fact is, that his own teetotum brain is upset, for it has no steadiness, no stability in it. He not only makes love to please himself, and he gives up his mistress for the same reason—under the name of “gallantry,” (perfectly French that, they having pretty names for all kinds of unhandsome proceedings!) but he has flippant speeches against the sex; such as many dissolute gentlemen, who assume the privilege to misuse it, and then abuse it, are in the habit of uttering. Lavatch banteringly replies to his lady the Countess of Rousillon:—


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“One good woman in ten, madam! Would that Heaven would serve the world so all the year! We’d find no fault with the tithe-woman if I were the parson. One in ten quotha? An we might have a good woman born at every blazing star, or at an earthquake, ’twould mend the lottery well: a man may draw his heart out ere he pluck one.” Among his snip-snap word-catching, he lets fall one or two good things; as where he says, “Though honesty be no Puritan, yet it will do no hurt; it will wear the surplice of humility over the black gown of a big heart.” The reasons he gives to the Countess why her son (and his master) should be a “melancholy man,” are neat, apprehensive, and witty; but he does not give his mother the real reason of her son Bertram’s “melancholy;” which was, that he was ill at ease with himself, having lost his own self-respect. He was in an exalted station in society, and he possessed a rascal soul; quite enough to make any man “melancholy,” who had a glimpse of self-knowledge and self-respect. The Clown says to the Countess— “By my troth, I take my young lord to be a very melancholy man.” “Count. By what observance, I pray you? “Clown. Why, he will look upon his boot, and sing; mend the ruff, and sing; ask questions, and sing; pick his teeth, and sing. I know a man that had this trick of ‘melancholy,’ sold a goodly manor for a song.” His idea of what is requisite to make a presentable appearance at court is entertaining from its appreciation of the all-sufficiency of external politeness as a passport into worldly society:— “Truly, madam, if Heaven have lent a man any manners, he may easily put it off at court. He that cannot make a leg, put off his cap, kiss his hand, and say nothing, has neither leg, hands, lip, nor cap; and, indeed, such a fellow, to say precisely, were not for the court: but for me, I have an answer will serve all men.” And this answer, comprised in three words, “O Lord, sir!” uttered in every variety of the modest, the disclaiming, the ingratiatory, and the simpering tone, forms an agreeable satire upon the efficiency of a meaningless sentence in the mouth of an effete man of the world. Lavatch’s retort upon the wordy braggadocio Parolles (whom he thoroughly appreciates, and, consequently, as thoroughly despises) is one of his best speeches. Upon the fellow’s exclaiming, “Why, I say nothing,” the Clown replies, “Marry, you are the wiser man; for many a man’s tongue shakes out his master’s undoing. To say nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing, and to have nothing, is to be a great part of your title, which is within very little of nothing.”


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Even the Steward in this play, although a part containing not more than half-a-dozen speeches, is a character so nicely discriminated, that no ordinary-minded player could sufficiently appreciate it, to give full effect to that deference of behaviour due from him to the Countess, his mistress, combined with his own consciousness of the dignity of his situation, from its responsibility; and none but a man of nice sentiment, with tasteful associations, could rehearse the soliloquy of Helena upon her love for Bertram, which he had overheard. It is in the 3d scene of the 1st Act. And the allusion to this circumstance introduces an exquisite passage, in the same scene, between her adopted orphan, Helena, where she is proving the report of the steward, and testing her own suspicions:— “You know, Helen, I am a mother to you. “Hel. Mine honourable mistress. “Count. Nay, a mother: Why not a mother? When I said, a mother, Methought you saw a serpent: what’s in mother, That you start at it? I say, I am your mother; And put you in the catalogue of those That were enwombed mine: ’tis often seen, Adoption strives with nature; and choice breeds A native slip to us from foreign seeds: You ne’er oppress’d me with a mother’s groan, Yet I express to you a mother’s care;— God’s mercy, maiden! does it curd thy blood To say, I am thy mother? What’s the matter, That this distemper’d messenger of wet, The many-colour’d Iris, rounds thine eye? Why?—that you are my daughter? “Hel. That I am not.” Then follows the fine confession of her love, already quoted: but the delicacy and ingenuity of the above equivoque are couched in the purest and most refined sense of womanly modesty, conscious of not possessing a requited love; for she has already confessed to herself the hopelessness of her passion, in that felicitous image of despondency— “It were all one That I should love a bright particular star, And think to wed it—he is so above me.”


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There is one feature in this play as regards the female portion of the dramatis personae, which may be said to form an exception to Shakespeare’s usual custom of contrasting his characters. Every one of these women is exemplary, every one good; and yet we recognise no monotony, no satiety, in the progress of the plot. The development of character proceeds with an ease and naturalness of manner that are enchanting. They are all in league to befool the traitor, Bertram, in his immoralities, and they carry their point triumphantly. The man who thinks to outwit three women who are aware of his purpose, must indeed be a stupendous ass; and had not Bertram been that ass, and knave to boot, he must have seen that Diana intended to throw him over. In the scene where she defends herself from his illicit suit, (the 2d of the 4th Act,) she affords an instance of how well Shakespeare’s women know how to vindicate their own good sense by sensible argument, and without becoming mere dogged debaters. There is always in the reasoning of his women a certain modest dignity, which preserves the feminine propriety, while it enhances the impressive effect of what they adduce in support of their own opinion. Notwithstanding the unmistakable tone of Diana’s appreciation of Bertram’s honour and moral integrity, he persists; and, at length, during the torrent of his protestations, she asks him for the ring on his finger, which he declines, giving as his reason— “It is an honour ’longing to our house, Bequeathed down from many ancestors; Which were the greatest obloquy i’ the world In me to lose.” Her reply to this is a clincher:— “Mine honour’s such a ring: My chastity’s the jewel of our house, Bequeathed down from many ancestors, Which were the greatest obloquy i’ the world In me to lose.” Well, he scatters “the honour of his house,” the bequest of his ancestors, and the “greatest obloquy in the world” to all the winds, and parts with the ring to her; and she, in return, makes an assignation with him; and, like a true-hearted woman, contrives that his own wife shall keep the appointment. When he has gone, she gives us a touch of womanly insight into character:— “My mother told me just how he would woo; As if she had sat in his heart.”


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But all the subordinate characters in this play are so well conceived and carefully developed, that they are interesting in and for themselves, and independently of the general story. The common soldiers, for instance, who entrap and hoodwink Monsieur Parolles, are complete specimens of their class; and, indeed, we shall have occasion to notice in other of Shakespeare’s plays, where he has introduced the private soldier, in how accurate a manner he has varied the features of the individual, maintaining all the while the integral identity of the species. Under whatever aspect he introduces the soldier, he uniformly makes him a man of the world, bearing about him an atmosphere of manner belonging to those who have quartered in various countries, and among varieties of customs. He never gives a homely, or home-loving character to his soldier. He appears to be, and he is, as happy anywhere as at home. His quarters and his rations are all his care; and where he fares best, that place is his home. He is always prepared for hard service; and is not more careless and light-hearted when he is joining his comrades in a “lark.” He will head a forlorn hope, or entrap and badger a poltroon with the like sedateness and determination of purpose. To unmask a battery—or a braggart, he will set about in the same businesslike style. Both are duties of honour, and both he fulfils to the utmost of his faculties. Nothing can be more complete than the conduct of the soldiers in this play. They know Parolles to be a coward; but as he is a man holding rank above them in the army, they do not proffer their opinion, or forget their station. He is their captain, yet they join heart and hand in the plot with his brother-officers, who keep no terms with his reputation. Be it repeated again and again,—the minutiae in character that Shakespeare has left to be inferred—that he has not expressed, as well as those that he has directly suggested, supply ample material, alone, and in themselves, for admiration at his intuitive perception of propriety. Schlegel has an agreeable as well as just remark upon one of the prevailing characteristics of this play. He says:—”In it age is exhibited to singular advantage; the plain honesty of the king, the good-natured impetuosity of old Lafeu, the maternal indulgence of the Countess Rousillon to Helena’s love of her son, seem all, as it were, to vie with each other in endeavours to conquer the arrogance of the young count.” The character of the old king is indeed one of a graceful placidity and sweet gravity, seasoned, moreover, with a high tone of severity against the least manifestation of baseness or duplicity. His dismissal of the young lords, who are departing for the war, is delivered in the purest spirit of chivalry:— “Farewell, young lords; Whether I live or die, be you the sons Of worthy Frenchmen: let higher Italy (Those ’bated, that inherit but the fall Of the last monarchy) see that you come Not to woo honour, but to wed it; when


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The bravest questant shrinks, find what you seek, That Fame may cry you loud. I say, farewell!” But the finest point in the old king’s conduct lies in his rebuke of Bertram, who objects to the union with Helena, solely on the score of her being a “poor physician’s daughter.” This is at once distinguished by its dignity, and by its noble distinction between the two qualities of true and false honour. Moreover, the calm and fine tone of reasoning is brought in with admirable relief against the irrational pride of the youth, who is neither touched by the argument, nor by the condescension of an old man and a king reasoning with his subject. He says— “’Tis only title thou disdain’st in her, the which I can build up. Strange is it, that our bloods, Of colour, weight, and heat, pour’d all together, Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off In differences so mighty. If she be All that is virtuous, (save what thou dislik’st, A poor physician’s daughter,) thou dislik’st Of virtue for the name; but do not so: From lowest place when virtuous things proceed, The place is dignified by the doer’s deed: Where great additions swell, and virtue none, It is a dropsied honour: good alone Is good, without a name; vileness is so: The property by what it is, should go, Not by the title. She is young, wise, fair; In these to Nature she’s immediate heir; And these breed honour: that is honour’s scorn, Which challenges itself as honour’s born, And is not like the sire: honours thrive, When rather from our acts we them derive, Than our foregoers: the mere word’s a slave, Debosh’d on every tomb; on every grave A lying trophy; and as oft is dumb, Where dust and damn’d oblivion is the tomb Of honour’d bones indeed. What should be said? If thou canst like this creature as a maid, I can create the rest: virtue and she Is her own dower; honour and wealth from me.” A finer reproof to arrogant assumption, from the mere accident of birth, it would take some trouble to quote. The old king combines in his character


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the greatest, indeed, the only qualities that constitute an honourable man: an incompetence to commit a base action, a placable and even magnanimous temper, (refer to his conduct in the last Act,) with a lively sense of gratitude for benefits received,—for he never for one moment compromises his debt of health to Helena. Of the Countess Rousillon, little more need be said, than that she is a specimen of a gentle and motherly, and even a grand woman. Her farewell speech to her son, Bertram, on his quitting home for the court, is scarcely inferior in wisdom of counsel to the one which Polonius addresses to his son, Laertes; it has, too, precisely that characteristic difference which the dramatist so well knew how to present—being a mother’s, instead of a father’s parting advice. It is the maternal exhortation of a noble-minded woman and high-souled lady— “Be thou blest, Bertram! and succeed thy father In manners as in shape! thy blood and virtue Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness Share with thy birthright! Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none: Be able for thine enemy Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend Under thy own life’s key:—be check’d for silence, But never tax’d for speech. What Heaven more will, That thee may furnish, and my prayers pluck down, Fall on thy head!—Farewell!” Then, turning to the old lord, Lafeu, we have a natural touch of the mother’s solicitude:— “My lord, ’Tis an unseason’d courtier; good, my lord, Advise him.” In those few words,—”Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none,” is condensed the whole code of social duty from man to man, in one golden rule. But the Lord Lafeu is the greatest character in the play. He is the very model of an aristocratic soldier: “quick in honour, sudden in quarrel;” acute in appreciating character—a quality remarkable in military men, from their habit of command, and of watching the dispositions of their subalterns. He is a steady friend, impenetrably brave, greatly magnanimous, and possessing a vein of scornful humour admirably in keeping with his profession, as well as his impetuosity of character. He is the type of his countryman, Bayard, the knight sans peur et sans reproche.


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It is Lafeu who first smokes the real character of the poltroon-scoundrel Parolles; and the moment he has made up his mind to it, he worries him as a mastiff would a mongrel. He sums up his character in one line— “That fellow’s soul is his clothes.” The art of the poet is here noteworthy in preparing the reader for Lafeu’s disgust at Parolles. It is their first interview, and Lafeu is addressing his conversation to Bertram respecting the sudden recovery of the king from his dangerous malady. Although not one word is addressed (in the first instance) by Lafeu to Parolles through the whole scene, yet the fellow, with the uneasy impudence and restless vulgarity of a swaggering dependant and fortune-hunter, struggling to bring himself upon a level with his company, contrives to take the word, and interrupt every observation made by the old nobleman. Uninvited, he persists in taking his share in the talk, and Lafeu as steadily cuts him, finishing his own sentences to Bertram. The scene is a curious one, corroborating, among hundreds of others, how, by inferences from the conduct of other characters in his plots, Shakespeare contrives to insinuate his own design and intention. This is one feature of what I mean by the “harmony” and “just proportion” of his mental faculty. Immediately after this scene, upon their second interview, when Parolles has been gasconading prodigiously, and Lafeu has had a gird at him, the Captain signifies that the veteran has the “privilege of antiquity,” and, but for that, he might—“Oh, ho! [bounces Lafeu] do not plunge thyself too far in anger, lest thou hasten thy trial—which if—Lord have mercy on thee for a hen! So, my good window of lattice, fare thee well; thy casement I need not open, for I look through thee!” He afterwards promises, for Bertram’s sake, to be friends with him; but the instant he enters, his disgust returns, and he again insults him. Bertram attempts an extenuation— “It may be you have mistaken him, my lord. “Laf. And shall do so, even though I took him at his prayers! Fare you well, my lord Bertram; and believe this of me, there can be no kernel in this light nut. Trust him not in matter of heavy consequence. I have kept of them tame, and know their natures. Farewell, Monsieur! I have spoken better of you than you have, or will deserve at my hand; but we must do good against evil.” Lafeu was a true prophet. Parolles betrays his master; and afterwards, in the abjectness of poverty, the old nobleman is the only one to whom he applies for relief. He knows, by instinct, that Lafeu, being a man of honour and true courage, is superior to the common motion of a low resentment. In reply, therefore, to his


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petition, he says, “Sirrah! inquire farther after me. I had talk of you last night. Though you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat.” Unconsciously we speak of these persons in conversations as though they had been characters in history; and they have existed, and they will exist, through all time; the privilege of every masterspirit who draws his resources from that deep well, the human heart. We identify his creations, and give them a “local habitation” in our memory and experience. One beautiful circumstance stands forth in the composition of Lafeu’s character; and that is, that with the goodness of his nature, he possesses the youngest heart in the company. Moreover, he brings enthusiasm enough for them all; and enthusiasm will keep the heart young even though it overtax the rest of the body. Read the 1st scene of the 2d Act, where he comes in to apprise the king of the arrival of his fair young physician, Helena. His delight at the approaching relief to his master’s malady causes him to run on in such a strain of boyish rhapsody that he is compelled to check himself, in order (as he says) that he may “seriously convey his thoughts in that light deliverance.” If Lafeu is the finest character in the play, Parolles is the most complete and original. Parolles is the type of all the cowards that have been introduced on the stage since his time. Doctor Johnson, again, in comparing him with Falstaff, manifested that he could have had but little perception of even the broadest distinctions in human character. There is as strong and as marked a distinction between Falstaff and Parolles, as between an impudent witty cheat—a fellow who will joke and laugh the money out of your pocket—and a dull, hard, sordid, and vulgar swindler. The cowardice of Falstaff arose quite as much from his constitutional love of ease, sociality, and self-enjoyment, as from an inherent want of principle and self-respect; it was the cowardice of fat and luxuriousness. Falstaff possessed qualities which attached to him friends of each sex. We all know the speech uttered by Bardolph after the fat knight’s death, “Would I were with him, wherever he is, in heaven or in hell.” A more genuine apotheosis to the social qualities of a man never was uttered. Even the women hated Parolles; and, upon my life, that man has little enough to recommend him whom women dislike. The Countess Rousillon speaks of him as a “very tainted fellow, full of wickedness;” and that her son “corrupts a well-derived nature with his inducement.” He held the respectable office of toad-eater, and something worse, to the weak young lord. Mariana, too, whom he had addressed in loveterms, says of him, “I know the knave!—hang him!—a filthy officer he is in those suggestions for the young earl.” And lastly, Helena describes him as a “notorious liar, a great way fool, and solely a coward.” She, too, although of a gentle nature, cannot forbear girding at him for being a palpable and transparent poltroon. In taking leave of her, to go to the court with his master, he says, with the insolence natural to a braggart, “Little Helen, farewell. If I can remember thee, I will think of thee at court.” She answers with the sarcasm of a well-bred female—


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“Monsieur Parolles, you were born under a charitable star. “Par. Under Mars, I. “Hel. I especially think, under Mars. “Par. Why under Mars? “Hel. The wars have so kept you under that you must needs be born under Mars. “Par. When he was predominant. “Hel. When he was retrograde, I think, rather. “Par. Why think you so? “Hel. You go so much backward when you fight. “Par. That’s for advantage. “Hel. So is running away when fear proposes the safety. But the composition that your valour and fear make in you, is a virtue of a good wing, and I like the wear well. “Par. I am so full of businesses I cannot answer thee acutely.” If Parolles had not been a fool as well as knave, he would not have answered Helena’s first reply. He did not know when to drop the dialogue, and at last does so like a fool. It was a pleasant thought in the poet, when the troops were returning victorious, and content with their triumph, to make Parolles, the boaster, the only one who is dissatisfied: and what a cause for his displeasure; because they had lost a drum! the only thing in a battle “full of sound and fury,” without result; the emblem of his precious self—empty, noisy, and urging on others to the fight. For the loss of this drum, therefore, he swells and fumes with infinite humour. While he is marching in procession, and the women inquire of each other why that “French jackanapes, with the scarfs, is so melancholy;” we hear him ejaculate, “Lose our drum! Well!”—and we find afterwards how he has been blowing and storming about this drum; for the young lords, when they are resolved that Bertram shall open his eyes to his purblind confidence in the knave, lay the plot to surprise him, one of them advises, “Oh, for the love of laughter, let him fetch his drum; he says he has a stratagem for it.” And the other echoes, “For the love of laughter, hinder not the humour of his design; let him fetch off his drum in any hand.” Bertram assents to the plot for the hoax; and Parolles coming in, he calls out to him— “How now, Monsieur; this drum sticks sorely in your disposition. “2 Lord. Oh, the deuce take it; let it go; ’tis but a drum. “Par. But a drum! Is ’t but a drum? A drum so lost!” The parley ends by Bertram promising, that if he will undertake the recovery of the drum, the whole merit of the enterprise shall be awarded to him. “Then, by


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the hand of a soldier,” answers Parolles, “I will undertake it;” adding, “I love not many words.” The scene of the plot which ensues (the opening of the 4th Act) is long, and, perhaps, the most humorous of its class ever penned; not untainted, however, with painfulness, as we contemplate the shocking self-prostration and debasement of a fellow-mortal. It opens with his famous soliloquy; which for self-knowledge, with baseness, has never been surpassed, not even, perhaps, equalled:— “Par. Ten o’clock: within three hours ’twill be time enough to go home. What shall I say I have done? It must be a very plausive invention that carries it. They begin to smoke me; and disgraces have of late knocked too often at my door. I find my tongue is too foolhardy; but my heart hath the fear of Mars before it, and of his creatures, not daring the report of my tongue. . . . What the devil should move me to undertake the recovery of this drum, being not ignorant of the impossibility, and knowing I had no such purpose? “I must give myself some hurts, and say I got them in the exploit. Yet, slight ones will not carry it; they will say, ‘Came you off with so little?’ and great ones I dare not give.” . . . Then follows one of those profound reflections that give one pause in studying these fine pictures of human nature. One of the young lords says, aside, “Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?” Well, the whole party sally from their ambush, seize, and blindfold him, jabbering all the while to each other in gibberish. One of the soldiers volunteers the office of interpreter between them; and to him, through fear of present death, he betrays the secrets of his party, and even traduces his friend and benefactor; the only one, by the way, of whom he speaks the truth. At this juncture, when he has blown himself up, and is left, the last of the party, the common soldier, reviles him in a farewell speech—“If you could find out a country where but women were, that had received so much shame, you might begin an impudent nation.” And when all are gone, and he is alone, he gives utterance to another remarkable prompting of self-knowledge:— “Yet am I thankful. If my heart were great, ’Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more; But I will eat, and drink, and sleep as soft As captain shall: simply the thing I am Shall make me live.” In the sequel, however, we find the poor wretch paying the extreme penalty of misery and starvation. He introduces himself to the Clown, whom he formerly


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had insulted, and now calls “Sir;” another instance of propriety in the poet’s characters, into whatever position they may be thrown— “Good Monsieur Lavatch, give my Lord Lafeu this letter I have, ere now, sir, been better known to you, when I have held familiarity with fresher clothes; but I am now, sir, muddied in fortune’s mood, and smell somewhat strong of her strong displeasure. “Clown. Truly, fortune’s displeasure is but sluttish if it smell so strongly as thou speak’st of. I will henceforth eat no fish of fortune’s buttering. Prithee, allow the wind. “Par. Nay, you need not stop your nose, sir. I spake but by a metaphor. “Clown. Indeed, sir; if your metaphor stink, I will stop my nose; or against any man’s metaphor. Prithee, get thee farther.” Old Lafeu comes in, inquires after his drum, and crowns his contempt of the reptile by telling him, that “though both fool and knave, he shall eat.” Two conclusions, among others, we must come to in reading this delightful play; one—that nobility of birth, without nobleness of character, is naught; and the other—that virtue and self-respect bring their own reward of peace and satisfaction within, with esteem and benevolence from all who are worthy to bestow them.

QQQ 1864—Thomas Kenny. From The Life and Genius of Shakespeare In the following excerpt, Kenny offers criticism of Shakespeare’s characterization and poetry. Kenny’s tone is relatively mild compared to other critics of the play, but he still concludes that All’s Well That Ends Well is one of the “least interesting of all the comedies of Shakespeare.”

The probable date of this play forms one of the minor problems of Shakespearian criticism. Dr. Farmer, in his “Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare,” published in 1767, was the first who expressed a belief that this is the comedy which Meres, in 1598, mentions under the title of “Love’s Labour’s Won;” and nearly all the succeeding commentators have adopted this conjecture. It does not seem to us, however, that the evidence is by any means conclusive in its favour. Coleridge believed that “All’s Well that ends Well” was “originally intended as the counterpart of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’” But we can discover no indication of any such intention, and there is, we think, as little resemblance between the two


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works as between any other two comedies of their author. The present title, too, of “All’s Well that Ends Well” seems indicated, with a distinctness which is very unusual in the Shakespearian drama, in several of its concluding passages. At the end of Act IV., Scene IV., we find Helena telling us— All’s well that ends well: still, &c. In Act V., Scene I., she repeats the same sentiment:— All’s well that ends well; yet, &c. The last line but one of the whole play is— All yet seems well; and, if it end so meet. And the second line of the epilogue still recurs to this idea:— All is well ended, if this suit be won. We may observe, however, that the termination of this last line recalls the title of Meres’ play of “Love’s Labour’s Won;” and it seems just possible that we may find another echo of the same designation in the language addressed by Diana to Bertram, towards the close of Act IV., Scene II.:— You have won A wife of me, though there my hope be done. And again, a few lines lower down, we have— Only, in this disguise, I think’t no sin, To cozen him that would unjustly win. And, finally, in one of Helena’s last addresses to Bertram, Act V., Scene III., she asks him— This is done: Will you be mine, now you are doubly won? Tieck and Coleridge thought they could discover in this comedy traces of two different styles; the one belonging to Shakespeare’s earlier, and the other to his later manner; and several of the more modern commentators are disposed to accept this judgment, and to conclude that the work was first produced, under


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the name of “Love’s Labour’s Won,” at a very early stage in the poet’s dramatic career, and that it was many years afterwards brought out by him in an altered and amended form, and under the name by which it is now known. We are not sure that this conjecture will derive any very substantial support from the passages we have above quoted, and which seem to recall each of the two titles. But a more solid presumption in its favour may be found in the contrast that appears to exist between different portions of the play as it stands. There are in it some scenes which contain more of Shakespeare’s loose, negligent rhymes than we usually find in any works which we can with perfect certainty assign to the maturity of his powers. We allude more particularly to the dialogue in Act II., Scene I., between the King and Helena, on the occasion of their first interview, and to the language of the King, Act II., Scene III., in remonstrating with Bertram on his refusal to accept Helena as a wife. On the other hand, we think we can perceive in many portions of this drama a firmness of conception, a steady insight into Nature, a personal freedom on the part of the poet, an absence of any readiness to enter into a compromise with the weaknesses and vices of the world, which do not naturally belong to the imagination or the passions of early life, and which we do not find displayed in his undoubted earlier dramas. We do not, however, believe that this evidence is to be found in any single passage so much as in the pervading spirit of the work; and we certainly cannot follow Malone in thinking that the words quoted by the King in Act I., Scene II., “‘Let me not live,’ quoth he, ‘after my flame lacks oil,’” &c., taken by themselves, might not have been written by Shakespeare at a comparatively early period in his dramatic career. But still less can we agree with the same critic that “the satirical mention made of the Puritans (Act I., Scene III.), who were the objects of King James’s aversion—‘Though honesty be no Puritan,’” &c., affords a reasonable ground for concluding that this play must have been written after that sovereign’s accession to the throne. We have no evidence that “All’s Well that ends Well” was ever acted before King James, and the whole character of Shakespeare’s drama is utterly opposed to the supposition that he was in any way disposed to court royal favour by humouring royal passions. We must add, however, that the dramas of Shakespeare were always apt to contain great inequalities, and that we can never feel perfectly safe in concluding from their existence that any particular play was written at any definite period in his career. We doubt, too, whether he ever engaged in any careful revision of any of his works; and we are perfectly convinced that any such revision must have been with him a very unusual and exceptional operation. Under these circumstances, we must leave the date of this play a subject of mere conjecture. We can have no doubt, however, on the other hand, as to the sources from which the main incidents in its plot were derived. Those incidents are closely copied from a tale which forms part of the “Decameron” of Boccaccio, and which was translated under the title of “Giletta of Narbona,” by William


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Paynter, in the first volume of his “Palace of Pleasure,” which was published in 1566. This information is of some use in qualifying our judgment of the poet’s workmanship. There is much in the general outline of his drama of which we must decidedly disapprove; but we find that all his most objectionable episodes are taken from the old tale; and we must, therefore, hold him less directly answerable for them than we should have done if they had been entirely of his own invention. In the pages of Boccaccio and of Paynter, the King of France is suffering from the same malady which we find mentioned in the drama; he is cured by Giletta, who answers to Shakespeare’s Helena; the latter obtains, as her reward, the unwilling hand of the young Count of Roussillon, who immediately leaves her for Florence, where she afterwards finds him attempting to intrigue with the daughter of a widow, and where she has, through the aid of this young woman, got possession of his ring, and has herself become a mother; and having thus fulfilled the two conditions on which alone he had engaged to recognise her as his wife, their reconciliation is ultimately effected. But the characters of the Countess, of the Clown, of Parolles, and of Lafeu, are wholly created by Shakespeare himself; and it is easy to see how much they contribute to give variety and animation to the worthless and extravagant story into which they are so naturally introduced. The unamiable character of Bertram seems to constitute the great defect of this drama. He is young, brave, handsome, and high-born; but he is, at the same time, petulant, arrogant, cold, and selfish, and his very vices present no feature of impressive interest. The unwelcome part which he plays is, no doubt, in some measure, the result of the false position in which he has been unfairly placed by the understanding between the King and Helena; but his own character appears to have been made unnecessarily repulsive. We lose all trust in him when, immediately after his apparent repentance, we find him insolently untruthful in his account of his relations with Diana; and this unexpected aggravation of his demerits seems to be somewhat unaccountably introduced, as we have no such scene in the original tale of Boccaccio. The poet most certainly has treated his hero with no indulgence; and we must further admit that the vices which Bertram exhibits are by no means, in themselves, improbable or untrue to the common experience of the world. But in the hero of a romantic episode they are out of place, and they are here essentially undramatic. The disagreeable character of the young Count tends greatly to diminish the interest which we should, under other circumstances, be disposed to feel in the adventures of the beautiful and afflicted Helena. We can entertain no very intense desire that she should succeed in the pursuit of an object which seems hardly to deserve her devotion; and, besides, we cannot quite conceal from ourselves that she only attains it by the employment of an extravagant and a not very delicate stratagem. She is herself brought before us with some drawbacks from the general beauty and elevation of her character. She has clearly no very strong regard for rigid,


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unequivocating truthfulness. She does not really mean to go, as she announces, on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Jaques. It is not true, as she states to Diana, that she does not know Bertram’s face. And, again, we find that she does not hesitate to cause false intelligence of the accomplishment of her pilgrimage and of her death to be conveyed to the camp at Florence. These departures from strict veracity harmonise, no doubt, readily enough with the rude spirit of old romance; but they contrast somewhat disagreeably with that general ideal perfection with which Shakespeare has invested many of his female characters, and Helena herself, in no small degree, among the number. But a scrupulous truthfulness is a virtue on the practice of which the poet hardly seems to have been disposed at any time very rigorously to insist. It is not, however, in purely romantic adventures that we must expect to meet with the higher manifestations of Shakespeare’s genius. The most admirable passages in this play are those in which he represents less extravagant aspects of life with his own curious fidelity to Nature. How finely Helena reveals to us the depth and the infatuation of her attachment to Bertram:— I am undone; there is no living, none, If Bertram be away. It were all one, That I should love a bright, particular star, And think to wed it, he is so above me In his bright radiance and collateral light Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. And in her subsequent dialogue with Parolles, with what subtle power she is made to play with the passion which consumes and all but over-masters her. All the scenes in which Parolles figures are more or less characteristic of the hand of Shakespeare; but they cannot be ranked among his most felicitous comic efforts. Parolles has been compared to Falstaff; there is, however, we think, no very strong resemblance between the two characters. The humour of Falstaff is self-conscious and intellectual; the humour to which Parolles gives rise is the result of the involuntary exhibition of his insolence, cowardice, falsehood, and folly. The cool, sharp sagacity and the contemptuous frankness of the old lord, Lafeu, are admirably employed in the unmasking of this shallow impostor. The “drum” scene will perhaps be generally regarded as the culminating point of these humorous sketches. But in the hardness of its form and in the completeness of the savage triumph over the unhappy braggart, we cannot recognise the finer genius of Shakespeare. He seems, however, to have been always ready to push to the utmost extremity the exposure of worthless and shallow pretenders, as we think we can see in the ultimate fate of Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph in “King Henry V.,” of Malvolio in “Twelfth Night,” and of Parolles in the present comedy.


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The language in “All’s Well that Ends Well” is often rude and harsh. The whole work is deficient in easy flow and in fine harmony of fancy. It is certainly not the least vigorous, but we believe that it is one of the least graceful and least interesting of all the comedies of Shakespeare.

QQQ 1896—Frederick S. Boas. From Shakespeare and His Predecessors Boas (1862–1957) is a skillful critic and reader of Shakespeare. In the following extract, he coins the phrase problem play in relation to a small group of Shakespeare’s later writings, including All’s Well That Ends Well. More than a century later, the term is still in widespread use within the field of Shakespeare studies, though critics debate what plays merit inclusion in the category. For example, The Merchant of Venice is often referred to today as a problem play (or, as the term is sometimes altered, as a problem comedy), though Boas did not include it in his original list. What distinguishes Boas from most of his predecessors and contemporaries is his focus on generic as well as moral analysis of the play, attempting to understand its dramaturgy or mechanics instead of simply judging it as offensive or not.

The opening of the seventeenth century coincides almost exactly with a sharp turning-point in Shakspere’s dramatic career. On one side of the year 1601 lie comedies of matchless charm and radiance, and histories which are half comedies. On the other appear plays, in which historical matter is given a tragic setting, or in which comedy for the most part takes the grim form of dramatic satire. The change has been compared to the passage from a sunny charming landscape to a wild mountain-district whose highest peaks are shrouded in thick mist. The causes of this startling alteration in the poet’s mood are, as has been shown, in great measure obscure. He was in the full tide of outward prosperity, and though his father died in 1601, this event could not have brought a keener pang than the loss of his only son in 1596, which seems to have left no shadow on his work. The Sonnets, with their record of mental anguish and disillusion, give a partial clue, but it must be acknowledged that the evidences of date tend to place the estrangement between Shakspeare and Will during the period of the brightest comedies, and their reconciliation just before the production of the graver plays. Another cause that has been suggested for the dramatist’s change from gaiety to gloom, is the failure of the conspiracy of Essex, followed by the


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execution of the Earl and the imprisonment of Shakspere’s friend Southampton. To this we might find a parallel in Spenser’s Complaints, whose pessimistic tone is largely due to his grief at the death of Sidney and Leicester. It can scarcely be a mere coincidence that Julius Caesar immediately follows the Earl’s tragic end, and it is remarkable that most of the plays which with more or less warrant may be assigned to the last three years of Elizabeth’s reign, contain painful studies of the weakness, levity, and unbridled passion of young men. This is especially the case with All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. The last-named play is, of course, distinguished from the others by its tragic ending, but it is akin to them in its general temper and atmosphere. All these dramas introduce us into highly artificial societies, whose civilization is ripe unto rottenness. Amidst such media abnormal conditions of brain and of emotion are generated, and intricate cases of conscience demand a solution by unprecedented methods. Thus throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome, even when, as in All’s Well and Measure for Measure, the complications are outwardly adjusted in the fifth act. In Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet no such partial settlement of difficulties takes place, and we are left to interpret their enigmas as best we may. Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of to-day and class them together as Shakspere’s problem-plays. * * * ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL is probably the earliest of this group1, and may be conjecturally dated about 1601–2. The source of the play is Boccaccio’s novel of Giglietta di Nerbona, which had been translated by Painter in his Palace of Pleasure. Here, as in other cases, notably The Merchant of Venice, Shakspere seems to have been attracted by the problem of working back from a traditional plot, full of anomalous incidents, to the motives that would render such incidents possible, or even probable. This he accomplishes in two ways: by giving to the puppet-like figures of the original story the special type of heart and brain from which certain actions necessarily flow, and by adding new characters who stand in some vital relation, whether of analogy or of contrast, to the central theme. Thus in the play before us, the hero, the heroine, and the King of France are taken from Boccaccio’s tale, while the Countess of Roussillon, Parolles, Lafeu, and the Clown are inventions of the poet. It was in the character of Helena, or Giglietta, as she is called in the romance, that Shakspere, as Elze has well brought out, found the chief temptation to


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dramatize the story. From his conception of this leading figure everything else springs by strict psychological necessity. The problem was to turn a woman, who in the novel is merely an adventuress, into an ideal of feminine strength and devotion, capable of saving the man she loves from the consequences of a nature at once stubborn and volatile. Thus Shakspere here treats the same subject as in The Taming of the Shrew, but with the parts reversed. There the man of firm will by heroic remedies forms a wayward girl into a devoted wife: here a woman of similar mould by remedies still more heroic shapes a husband of potential excellence out of a headstrong youth. In the one case we have a wellnigh burlesque handling of the natural relation between the sexes: in the other an abnormal relation is prevented from becoming repulsive by being elevated almost into the tragic sphere. Helena in the drama, as in the novel, is the child of Gerard de Narbon, physician to the Count of Roussillon, who on her father’s death had reared her as a foster-daughter along with his own son Bertram. The Count has himself just died, and Bertram, who is now left in ward to the French king, is setting forth for the Court at Paris. Of the tears shed at his departure, the bitterest flow from the eyes of Helena, who has formed a deep, silent love for her early playmate. This love is rooted in humility. The poor dependant—for Shakspere has rightly made Helena poor instead of rich, as in the novel—looks up to the scion of the great feudal house as a being of another sphere: ‘It were all one That I should love a bright particular star And think to wed it, he is so above me.’ The imagery that she uses in speaking of their relation is borrowed from the most abject forms of worship: ‘Now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy Must sanctify his relics;’ and again, ‘Indian-like Religious in mine error, I adore The sun, that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more.’ Similarly she compares herself to the hind that would be mated to the lion, and whose fate is to die for love. The very existence of her passion needs an apology, ‘It hurts not him that he is loved of me.’ Her highest gratification has been the


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bitter-sweet indulgence of gazing constantly upon her heart’s idol—so near her and yet so infinitely removed. ‘’Twas pretty, though a plague, to see him every hour.’ Thus Shakspere has emphasized the womanly self-abasement of Helena to a degree where it borders on servility, in order to prove that, in her own words, she does not ‘follow him with any token of presumptuous suit,’ but with the sacred zeal of a divine mission. Her penetrating insight has revealed to her that there are spots in the sun that she so ardently worships, and she fears that in the ‘learning-place’ of the court they may grow bigger and darker. She feels within herself, humble though she be, a power to arrest that growth, and for this she is eager to spend herself to the utmost. Nothing is further from her mind than her own worldly advancement: ‘My master, my dear lord he is: and I His servant live, and will his vassal die.’ But the dramatist has hit upon a device for convincing us of Helena’s singlemindedness far more effective than any sentiments from her own lips. A mother has proverbially the quickest eye for spying out a design against her son’s happiness, and is the severest critic of any claimant to the love that has hitherto been hers alone. Thus our sympathies are warmly aroused in Helena’s favour when we find that she is loved by the Countess of Rousillon, as if she were her own child. The Countess, who is purely a creation of Shakspere, is the most engaging type of French character that he has drawn. She is, in the very best sense, a grande dame of the ancien régime. She has the aristocratic virtues without their defects. Her rich experience of life has taught her valuable lessons, in which she schools her son before he plunges into the temptations of the Court. To a high-bred graciousness of speech and bearing, she unites that dislike of outward emotional display, that repose of manner which stamps her caste. She has felt too many ‘quirks of joy and grief ’ to be readily demonstrative, but her sympathies are wonderfully keen and alert; she is one of the women who never break with the memory of their own past, and who thus, with the silvered hair and the faded cheek, preserve the secret of perpetual youth. She had long half divined Helena’s secret, and when she gets accidental confirmation of it, she is stirred by the deepest fellow-feeling ‘Even so was it with me when I was young: If ever we are nature’s, these are ours; this thorn Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong; Our blood to us this to our blood is born: It is the show and seal of nature’s truth, Where love’s strong passion is impress’d in youth: By our remembrances of days foregone, Such were our faults; or then we thought them none.’


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The woman who is unassailable by the deadening influences of old age is equally proof against the exclusive spirit of exalted rank. She knows the sterling worth of the girl reared under her own eye, and she recognizes in her, in spite of the difference in station, the fittest bride for her son. She forces her into a shamefaced avowal of her passion, and smooths the way for the enterprise by which she seeks to win him in his own interest. Gervinus however, in his desire to emphasize the difference between Helena and the scheming Giglietta of the novel, goes too far when he asserts that it is the Countess who first suggests to the girl the idea of making her journey to Paris for the cure of the invalid king, a means to the acquisition of Bertram. Helena avows with absolute candour: ‘My lord your son made me to think of this; Else Paris, and the medicine, and the king, Had from the conversation of my thoughts Haply been absent then.’ She is not, in the bad sense, a schemer, but, on the other hand, she is no idle waiter upon Providence, and she seizes, now and hereafter, with tactical promptitude, upon the chances thrown in her way. Hers is the deliberate creed of self-help, specially appropriate on the lips of an orphan: ‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope; only, doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.’ The healing of the king’s body is evidently intended by Shakspere to foreshadow the healing of Bertram’s spirit. In both cases the patient is unwilling to submit to the cure; in both Helena prevails by her profound conviction of a heaven-sent mission, and by the sacrificial ardour that is ready to stake life itself. To such a nature the end sanctifies the means, and Shakspere, with dramatic consistency, makes Helena bluntly demand a husband in return for her services, though in the novel the offer of this reward comes from the king. But, on the other hand, the strangeness of the situation, where the woman chooses her lifepartner from among the young nobles at the Court, is tempered by a number of subtle touches. We see the disappointment of lord after lord as she passes them by, and we hear the muttered complaints of the experienced Lafeu that he is too old to take his chance with the rest. We get a further hint of the spirit in which Helena is acting from the words which she addresses to one of the lords: ‘Be not afraid that I your hand should take, I’ll never do you wrong for your own sake.’


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If she is about to do a wrong in the sense of making an unnatural claim, it is to be for the benefit of the person seemingly injured. And this is yet more directly stated when she pauses before Bertram: ‘I dare not say, I take you: but I give Me and my service, ever whilst I live Into your guiding power.—This is the man.’ Thus at the supreme moment when she claims Bertram for her own, Helena repeats that she offers him ‘service.’ She has already spoken of herself to the Countess as his ‘servant’ and ‘vassal.’ These words are not to be taken merely as metaphors. United to the semi-religious element in Helena’s mission, there is another which may easily be overlooked, as it is foreign to modern ideas. She feels throughout that as a dependant of the great house she stands in a feudal relation to Bertram, and that in return for the protection extended to her, she owes him, in the technical sense, ‘service.’ Here once again Shakspere uses for dramatic purposes a distinctively mediaeval conception, and Gervinus misses this point when he asserts that ‘the difference of blood and rank has no importance for Helena.’ It would be truer to say that she never forgets it, and that the spirit of her relation to Bertram is almost identical with that of the lowly Griseldis is to Count Walter, though in the one case service is shown by passive endurance, and in the other by strenuous action. Indeed, as soon as Helena has won Bertram’s hand, she sinks back into a slavish submission to his authority, unparalleled save by Count Walter’s bride. She obeys his cruel orders without a murmur, and departs homeward unkissed. His curt and icy letter decreeing eternal separation between them till seemingly hopeless conditions are fulfilled, wrings from her only a few sharp twitches of pain, ‘This is a dreadful sentence,’ and ‘’Tis bitter.’ Unlike the Giglietta of Boccaccio she does not at once begin to consider how these conditions may be met. The thought that drowns all others is that through her Bertram has been driven to the Italian wars, where he is in danger of his life. Once more she must sacrifice herself for his sake, and fly the home to which he will not return while she is there. It is appropriate to her religious nature that her flight should take the form of a pilgrimage, though with the lurking hope that some means of deliverance may be forthcoming, she breaks her journey at Florence. Here Bertram’s infatuation for Diana, the daughter of her hostess, enables her in the most unforeseen fashion to comply with his conditions. Once again she seizes with swift decision the opportunity placed in her way; once again she does Bertram ‘wrong for his own sake,’ by this plan which, in her own words, ‘Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed, And lawful meaning in a lawful act, Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact.’


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She achieves her object, and her husband, with a cry for pardon and promise of steadfast love, throws himself at her feet. Thus ‘all ends well,’ and we feel that Helena deserves her triumph, yet her fortunes do not awaken our keenest sympathies, like those of Portia, Viola, and Rosalind. Coleridge has called her ‘the loveliest of Shakspere’s women,’ but no chorus of general acclaim echoes the critic’s judgement. Helena exercises over the majority of readers a less powerful charm than over the personages in the play. She lacks the superb air of distinction which stamps other of Shakspere’s heroines. She is, to say the truth, in the eyes of a generation unfamiliar with her feudal doctrine of service, a trifle bourgeoise. She has all the virtues of the missionary type of character, the courage, the self-sacrifice, the faith that moves mountains. But what her nature thus gains in intensity it loses in breadth. She is Puritan in her poverty of interests and of culture, and in her narrow concentration upon a single aim. Shakspere achieved a triumph in making the woman who had to play so strange a part entirely worthy of our admiration, but even he could not gain for her our love. The character of Helena necessarily determines that of Bertram. A man grown to maturity, schooled, for good or for evil, in the ways of the world, could not have been moulded by a girl. Bertram is little more than a boy, on the threshold of life’s responsibilities and its temptations. Early influences have been in his favour. His mother’s character we know, and the king gives an equally attractive picture of his dead father. From him Bertram inherits ‘his arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,’ as well as his valour and passion for martial glory. It speaks well for him that the novel attractions of the court should not temper his impatience at being held back from the Italian campaign: ‘I shall stay here, Creaking my shoes on the plain masonry, Till honour be bought up, and no sword worn, But one to dance with.’ But this high spirit has another, less worthy side, in Bertram’s pride of birth, wherein he differs as far as possible from his parents. Youth is always apt to judge by externals, and the heir to material advantages of rank and wealth is easily blinded to the value of the less concrete treasures of the mind and heart. Love as a rule is the first influence to bring a clearer vision, and love is to Bertram as yet unknown2. It is this haughty, hot-blooded boy who now by the arbitrary fiat of the king finds himself constrained to take to wife a woman, separated from him by caste, robbed by familiarity of the magical charm of the unknown, and whose very claim to his hand violates the elementary relations of man and woman. So gross is this invasion of primary personal right that our sympathies lean strongly to Bertram’s side. But once again it is needful to remember that the story moves in a semi-mediaeval atmosphere, and that feudalism did not recognize the claims


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of the individual in the same degree as modern theories of life. The king had the power of regulating the marriage of his wards, and Bertram’s disobedience to his command would have far less warrant then than now. Moreover there is an unworthy element of mere class-pride in his disdainful rejection of Helena, which merits and receives severe rebuke from his sovereign’s lips: ‘From lowest place when virtuous things proceed, The place is dignified by the doer’s deed: When great additions swell’s, and virtue none, It is a dropsied honour. Good alone Is good without a name: vileness is so: The property by what it is should go, Not by the title.’ Thus here, as so often, Shakspere contrasts external show with real worth, and it is beyond question that patrician scorn or lowly merit aroused in him the poet’s ‘scorn of scorn.’ But it is inconsistent with all that we know of him personally, and with the general tone of his writings, to suppose that he had modern doctrinaire views about the equality of all men, or that the play before us is intended as a protest against social distinctions. The whole attitude of Helena, as we conceive of it, is based upon the recognition of the difference in rank between herself and Bertram. Moreover the king’s enforcement of an arbitrary right is by no means in accord with democratic ideas, nor is his further exercise of prerogative in ennobling Helena on the spur of the moment. If any social doctrine is to be drawn from the scene it is that all men are equal—before the throne, which indeed was the view of the Tudor sovereigns. That even after Helena’s elevation Bertram will not consent to be her husband, save in name, proves that class-pride is not his only reason for rejecting her. From the insufferable prospect of ‘the dark house and the detested wife’ he flies with Parolles to the Italian wars. His native bravery gains him brilliant distinction on the battlefield, but he is led away by his worthless companion into the coarsest sensual pleasures. The family pride, which had stood in the way of his union with Helena, is trampled under foot at the demand of ‘the important blood,’ and the ancestral ring denied to his wife is granted to a paramour: ‘Here, take my ring: Mine house, mine honour; yea, my life be thine, And I’ll be bid by thee.’ By this surrender he forfeits the right to further urge the claims of rank against Helena, and it is in the strictest poetic justice that he should in this very way enable her to fulfil the conditions that he has imposed upon her. At the same


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time he learns from his mother that Helena is dead, and the news, accompanied by the Countess’ reproofs, affects him strongly. We are told that on the reading of the letter ‘he changed almost into another man.’ Yet there is little proof of this in the concluding scene of the play. His military services, backed by letters of recommendation from the Duke of Florence, have regained him the favour of the king, who is about to give him in marriage to Lafeu’s daughter. But the ring which he unwittingly has received from Helena suddenly rises in witness against him, and to screen himself he lies unblushingly. Then follows Diana’s accusation, which he meets with further lies, and the result is that the king, who throughout the play acts with despotic impetuosity, orders Diana to prison, and Bertram to be seized on suspicion of Helena’s murder. The Count’s over-ingenious devices recoil upon his own head, and when, at the height of the mystification, Helena herself appears, Bertram may well hail her as a deliverer. The dramatic entanglement in this scene is highly ingenious—more so than has been generally recognized—and it no doubt appealed strongly to the peculiar Elizabethan delight in ‘mistaken identity.’ But psychologically the treatment is very unsatisfactory. Bertram, with his sins of lust and lying still green upon him, without penance or repentance, vows eternal fidelity to Helena, and on this brittle foundation we must build our trust that ‘all ends well.’ Once again Shakspere reminds us that there is no situation which he handles so crudely as the reunion between an injured woman and her faithless lover or husband. The most favourable omen for the future is that Bertram has learnt the worthless character of his evil genius Parolles. This personage of Shakspere’s creation is introduced as the complete contrast to Helena, and as a foil, in certain respects, to Bertram. The heroine proves her quality throughout by deeds; Parolles, as his name implies, is the empty spinner of words. He is another variation on the type of the Miles Gloriosus, which the Elizabethan drama borrowed from Roman comedy. Don Armado, Pistol, and, from one point of view, Falstaff, all belong to the species, as well as the Bobadil and Tucca of Ben Jonson, and the Bessus of Beaumont and Fletcher. In Parolles we have the consummate union of the braggart and another classical type, the parasite. He thus is a product of the comedy of manners, and is far more nearly akin to Pistol, that strange offshoot of the comedy of humours, than to Falstaff who, in his deepest essence, is a profoundly serious rather than merely humorous figure. From the vagueness of outline of the mere type Parolles is delivered by a strong dash of national colour. As the Countess is the noblest of Shakspere’s French creations, Parolles is the vilest. The Dauphin and Orleans in Henry V are caricatures of true chivalry, but even a caricature retains a distorted trace of likeness to its original, which is utterly wanting in this liar, pandar, and sneak. A superficial showiness and glib volubility are the capital elements of his slender


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stock in trade. By most of those who come near him, this ‘window of lattice’ is seen through at a glance. Helena knows his ‘fixed evils,’ though her passion for Bertram makes her tender to them. The Florentine women hiss out in the open street their curses upon this ‘vile rascal,’ this ‘jack-a-napes with scarves.’ The sharp-sighted Lafeu—and indeed it is the chief reason for his presence in the play—never tires of covering him with ‘most egregious indignity.’ ‘I did think thee for two ordinaries to be a pretty wise fellow: thou didst make tolerable vent of thy travel: it might pass: yet the scarfs and bannerets about thee, did manifoldly dissuade me from believing thee a vessel of too great a burden.’ He warns Bertram that ‘there can be no kernel in this light nut: the soul of this man is in his clothes.’ But it neither wants the instinct of a woman nor the trained sagacity of a statesman to see through this dressed-up impostor. The French lords, his companions-in-arms, have found him out to be a ‘hilding,’ a ‘bubble,’ ‘a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, a hourly promise-breaker.’ It is they who prepare the stratagem for exposing him in his true colours before Bertram, who alone has been dazzled by the garish trappings of this pretender, this ‘gallant militarist that had the whole theorie of war in the knot of his scarf and the practice in the chape of his dagger.’ The exposure is so overwhelming in its merciless completeness that laughter is stifled at its source by the sting of shame at the spectacle of humanity wallowing in such a slough of mud. Truth, military honour, patriotism, friendship, are all sacrificed with equal readiness in order that Parolles may keep a whole skin. It is the complete realization of the Roman satirist’s ideal of infamy, propter vitam vivendi perdere causas, and it finds its climax in the dastardly cry, ‘Let me live, sir, in a dungeon, i’ the stocks, or anywhere, so I may live.’ A last touch is added, after the trick has been revealed, in the caitiff ’s deadness to his shame: ‘Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll he no more; But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft As captain shall: simply the thing I am Shall make me live. Rust, sword I cool, blushes! and Parolles, live Safest in shame!’ The tartness of scenes such as these is not tempered by comedy of sweeter flavour. The clown Lavatch is one of Shakspere’s most insipid jesters, and his coarse jokes about women and marriage are scarcely suitable to the ears of the stately and virtuous Countess. Yet he lets drop a phrase which Dowden has happily chosen as a motto for the play, ‘That man should be at woman’s command, and yet no hurt done!’


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All’s Well That Ends Well NOTES 1. The play first appears in the folio, and we have only internal evidences to go on. The percentage of double endings (20) points to the date mentioned above, as do a number of minor resemblances to Hamlet (e.g. the Countess’ precepts to her son on his departure to Paris recall those of Polonius to Laertes; Hamlet calls Denmark ‘a prison,’ Parolles calls France ‘a stable,’ a ‘dog-hole.’) The only feature that seems to suggest an earlier date is the occurrence in the dialogue of numerous rhymed passages, some of them of considerable length, e.g. I. i. 231–244; II. i. 133–213; and II. iii. 78–111 and 132–151. On the strength of such passages, and some minor links with Love’s Labour’s Lost, many critics have supposed that All’s Well is a recast of an earlier play, probably Love’s Labour’s Won, mentioned by Meres in 1598. This theory has been stated in its most positive form by Fleay (New Shaks. Soc. Trans. 1874). But Hertzberg, in his introduction to the German Shakspere Society’s edition of Schlegel and Tieck’s translation, contends that this view is false. He identifies (as already stated) Love’s Labour’s Won with The Taming of the Shrew, and argues that All’s Well was entirely written at one period, sometime between 1600 and 1603. He shows with great force that the rhyming lines, like the rest of the play, have often the break in the sense in the middle of the verse, instead of at the end, and that their frequently harsh rhythm and elliptical construction are quite different from the smooth, transparent couplets of the early comedies. He might have added that the rhyming lines occur chiefly, according to a familiar usage in Shakspere, in passages of sententious reflection, or of interchange of repartee, as between Helena and the king. Another consideration which deserves more weight than is generally given to it, is that Shakspere, in his first joyous period, would scarcely have handled a theme with such sombre features as the plot of All’s Well. I therefore incline to Hertzberg’s view, while admitting that the question has not been quite conclusively settled. Elze, in his interesting essay on the play, gives up all attempt to fix the date. 2. The theory of Hertzberg, founded upon an obscure passage in the fifth act, that Bertram is attached to Maudlin, the daughter of Lafeu, is, as Elze has conclusively shown, quite untenable. Apart from the other difficulties which it would raise, it is disproved by the conduct of Lafeu himself, who could never have been so enthusiastic about a woman who was robbing his daughter of her lover.


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ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY q

If All’s Well That Ends Well took one step forward in the nineteenth century, it took two or more steps back in the early twentieth century. Recent commentators have noted that, perhaps surprisingly, the start of the century witnessed the harshest criticism of the play since, and if not including, the eighteenth century. Brander Matthew’s sensationally hostile treatment of the play, for example, serves to illustrate this point all too bluntly. Fortunately, the comedy did not have to wait too long for a defender. W.W. Lawrence’s essay on the narrative backdrop and history of the All’s Well plot, with his call to historicize the play in order to understand it as something other than a failure, marks a new direction in the play’s critical reception. However, the play was not to receive this kind of historicized attention again until well into the second half of the century. In the meantime, utilizing formalism and character analysis, two giants of midcentury Shakespearean studies, E.M.W. Tillyard and G. W. Knight, arrived at different conclusions about the question of the play’s failure—still the primary focus and natural starting point for criticism of the play in the middle of the twentieth century (as it had been since the eighteenth century). Tillyard’s attention to language and rhetoric leads him to conclude that, while the play has merits, it is ultimately marred by Shakespeare’s limited efforts of imagination and creativity. Knight, on the other hand, by raising Helena’s character to virtual sainthood, is able to refute the charge of failure by showing the play’s comic resolution through Bertram’s “salvation.” In the second half of the century, however, as literary studies began to be increasingly informed by various theoretical influences (approaches originating in diverse interests or “schools,” such as Marxist readings invested in exploring such elements as the relationships between social classes or feminist readings focused in part on understanding how women are represented in literary texts) All’s Well That Ends Well received proportionally more attention than at any time in its history. As many have noted, the principal approach to the play in recent decades has been through the lens of gender studies, attempting to understand the complicated gender roles occupied by Bertram and Helena. A 71


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major statement in this line is reproduced in this section in David McCandless’s excellent analysis of the play’s repressed sexual themes. For the first time in the play’s history, the principal aim of writing about All’s Well That Ends Well is not to decide whether it is a failure or not. Free from the constraints of overtly moral criticism—of talking about characters as “good” and “bad” models of human behavior—critics have been able to uncover and discuss diverse and often teasingly ambiguous elements in both the play’s form and content.

1911—Thomas Lounsbury. From Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist Lounsbury (1838–1915) taught at Yale University and published widely during his career. His written work studied a diverse array of authors from Chaucer to James Fenimore Cooper and, of course, Shakespeare. In the following excerpt, Lounsbury’s starting point is the play’s failure to be “just and natural” in its art. However, Lounsbury works to develop sympathy for Bertram (at the expense of Helena) and offers some early thoughts on the dark moral ambiguity of the play’s resolution.

Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time. His representation of life should in consequence be true of all time. Such it usually is; and it has survived because it is independent of changes of taste or custom. There are found in his works a few such variations from what we feel to be just and natural, though perhaps none so noticeable as this. They belong to details, and not to any single work as a whole. To this there is one exception,— the comedy of ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’ It is a play which has never met with much favor on the modern stage. First revived by Giffard, in 1741, at his theatre in Goodman’s Fields, it was acted, a few times after that, during the rest of the century, at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden. But the success it met with, such as it was, came mainly from the representation of Parolles and the episode of his exposure and disgrace. It was but little due to the interest inspired by the story itself or by its chief characters. Not even the genius of Shakespeare has been equal to making men accept with pleasure the plot of this comedy, or to respond very warmly to the eulogiums passed upon the heroine, worthy of admiration as she is in many ways. Of the hero hardly any one has ever been found to say a good word. “I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram,” wrote Dr. Johnson: “a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman he has wronged, defends


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himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.” This hostile estimate, in spite of its injustice, has set the style of most of the comment upon the hero of the piece; while no amount of praise has been thought too lavish to spend upon the heroine. As Bertram is drawn, it must be admitted that he is not a highly estimable personage. Morally the best thing to his credit is a high degree of merely brute valor, while intellectually his lack of perspicacity makes him an easy prey to the pretensions of a braggart and a coward. But so far as his relations with the heroine are concerned, there is a good deal to be said on his side. He has forced upon him a wife he does not desire. Not merely are his own inclinations disregarded, but his pride of birth is outraged. He is a victim, and by no means a willing victim. He naturally hates the chains which have been imposed upon him by a power to which he is constrained to submit. Nor can any excellence in Helen’s character counterbalance the fundamental fact that she has been untrue to her sex. She persistently pursues a man who is not merely indifferent but averse. The situation is not made less, but even more disagreeable by its being a chase on her part of a man not worth following. All the explanations given of her conduct, all the tributes paid to her character, cannot veil the fact that she takes advantage of the favor of the king to do an essentially unwomanly act. Higher station or great superiority of fortune might justify a woman in going a long way in making advances to a lover of lower position, who for that very reason would naturally be reluctant to put forward his pretensions. But Helen has no such excuse. Whatever be her intellectual and moral excellence, she has nothing which he cares for to give to the husband upon whom she has forced herself in the face of his outspoken unwillingness. In real life we know how we should all think and feel in such a case. Our sympathies would not go out to the successful schemer, but to the hunted man who is compelled to have associated with him in the closest relation of life a woman for whom he feels dislike. So far from believing with Johnson that Bertram is dismissed to happiness, we may be sure that under ordinary conditions nothing but misery will be the fate of a couple where the consciousness of difference of station would add to the estrangement produced by difference of character, and where fraud has been the only agency to bring about the consummation of a union which could never have been effected in the first place save by force.

QQQ 1913—Brander Matthews. From Shakespeare as a Playwright Matthews (1852–1929) was a Shakespearean scholar who taught at Columbia University. In this selection, we see standard criticisms


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All’s Well That Ends Well against the play voiced with unusual fervor, even zeal. For Matthews, All’s Well That Ends Well has no redeeming qualities and is simply “the weakest” of all Shakespeare’s plays.

‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ is the feeblest of the lot, dramaturgically and psychologically. Of all the plays which are indisputably Shakspere’s own, it is the weakest. The story is offensive; the plotting is casual; the character-drawing is unconvincing and inconsistent; and the humor is inexpensive. The method throughout is immature, as if in sympathy with the puerility of the subject. The story which he borrowed from Boccaccio is absurd and unpleasant. At bottom it may not be more medieval than that of the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ but it is less capable of effective dramatic development. And while the story of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ may be impossible when tested by the facts of life, it is sweet and pleasant, whereas the story of ‘All’s Well,’ perhaps not absolutely impossible in itself, is odious and offensive. The story of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ Shakspere builds up into a compact plot, rising scene by scene to its climax and declining at last in a lovely vision of young love delighting in its triumph; but the story of ‘All’s Well’ he leaves a straggling sequence of episodes of mere narrative baldly presented in dialogue. Probably the theme could not have been made dramatically attractive; and certainly Shakspere does not make it either attractive or dramatic. Apparently it was Shakspere’s ingrained belief (founded it may be on his own experience) that woman is not only willing to meet her wooer half-way, as Juliet and Rosalind do, but often to make advances, as Olivia and Phoebe and Desdemona do—and also the Venus of ‘Venus and Adonis.’ This belief is pushed to its uttermost extreme in ‘All’s Well,’ where we see Helena forcing the unwilling Bertram into a distasteful marriage and then winning him by the most despicable of tricks, a device as indelicate as it is crude. That the heroine is capable of descending to such a low contrivance, with all that it implies, robs her at once of any claim to sympathy. And in the desire to force the contrast between her and the man she takes captive, Shakspere persistently blackens him and makes him so contemptible a creature that she degrades herself in our eyes almost as much by the mere fact that she pursues such a cad as by the abhorrent contrivance which makes him hers at last. We do not even pity her in her success; rather do we despise them both. The situation in which the original tale forces her to place herself is, as Andrew Lang put it sharply, “at once hideous and wholly out of keeping with Helena’s character as it appears in her conversations” with Bertram’s mother. But it is not out of keeping with her earlier conversation with Parolles in which she bandies words about her own virginity—a conversation reeking with vulgarity and quite impossible to a modest-minded girl, however frank and plain-spoken she might be. Almost as degrading are the speeches in which she challenges one


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lord after another to marry her before she unexpectedly claims the unsuspecting Bertram, a scene needless in itself, and needlessly gross, made worse by the vulgar comments of La Feu. Henry James once asserted that George Sand had no taste morally; only very rarely could a similar accusation be brought against Shakspere; but here, in these two scenes, is evidence that he was not unwilling to descend to tickle the groundlings of the Globe with the quibbling indecency they avidly relished. Shakspere’s great plays are for all time; but ‘All’s Well’ and its fellows are only for Tudor days. Shakspere has padded out the main narrative with irrelevant humor. The theme itself did not suggest or call for comic characters; and these which Shakspere has inserted remain extraneous to the central story. He returns to the “clown,” that is, to the low comedian sent on the stage at intervals merely to be funny without the aid of an assumed character. In ‘All’s Well’ this lowcomedy part is actually nameless; in the First Folio he is frankly designated as the “clown.” This clown has conversations with the Countess and with La Feu empty of significance but bristling with verbal quibbles and often with obscene innuendo. These dialogues are lacking in any flavor of character; they are on the level of the “sidewalk conversations” of our modern variety-shows. Andrew Lang was not overstating the case when he calls the frivolities of the clown “coarse and stupid, even beyond the ordinary stupidity of Elizabethan horse-play.” Although the clown is the least comic of all alleged comic characters, the other figures supposed to be amusing are only a little more truthful. The old lord, La Feu (intended obviously for the actor who had played Polonius and who was to play Pandarus), is a traditional type, frequent in other Elizabethan pieces and not here sharply individualized. The cowardly soldier, Parolles (designed probably for the performer of Sir Andrew Aguecheek), is only a variant of the braggart, which English comedy had taken over from the Greek and the Latin, the Italian and the French. He is a diminished replica of Falstaff done without gusto or unction. The episodes in which he appears lack spontaneity; they suggest fatigue of invention; and such humor as they have is largely mechanical and often perfunctory. The protracted scene in which Parolles is convicted of cowardice has flashes of fun now and again, but it is only an example of that most primitive form of humor, the practical joke. Deficient as ‘All’s Well’ is in dramatic vigor and in psychologic veracity, it is deficient also in poetry. Passages there are in which we find the true Shaksperian fire; but there are only a few of them. Even in style, which rarely forsakes Shakspere, we find a sad falling-off. There are long speeches and dialogues in rime, stuffed with classical allusions, even when the situation cries aloud for the large simplicity of blank verse. Helena’s letter is in sonnet form; and her final soliloquy is in rime, as though the arbitrariness of the theme compelled artificiality of treatment. There is an unreality of thought and a stiff mannerism


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of expression far removed from the noble felicity of the speeches in ‘Hamlet.’ In fact, if we knew Shakspere only as the author of ‘All’s Well’ we should rank him with the outer throng of his contemporaries, and not higher than the average of those whose works have survived. It may be that when he composed ‘All’s Well’ he was worn and weary, distracted by some personal suffering we can only guess at. Yet it needs to be said once more that his effort seems always to be in direct proportion to the attraction exerted upon him by the subject he is at work on. When his theme is inspiring he puts forth all his power, and stands revealed as the accomplished playwright and the incomparable poet. But he is often casual in the selection of his subject, taking whatever trifling tale chances to be nearest to his hand and descending to stories wholly unworthy of his genius. Then his ambition is not roused and his endeavor is relaxed; he moves along the line of least resistance, and he is concerned chiefly to supply the groundlings with what they will enjoy.

QQQ 1922—W. W. Lawrence. From “The Meaning of All’s Well That Ends Well” Lawrence’s essay is significant and marks an important new direction in analysis of the play. Just as Boas had encouraged the play to be read not simply as a moral failure but as a generic structure, Lawrence encourages readers to approach the work as a narrative product of its time. While the play may “fail” for modern readers and audiences, Lawrence argues, a careful examination of the traditional stories resembling the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well, products of the Middle Ages, show how Shakespeare and his audience would have been comfortable and familiar with devices that later generations would see as unnatural and awkward. Whether this is correct or not (it rules out the popular view of the play today as being experimental in favor of conformity), it signals a change in the way critics speak about the play and is a reminder of the importance of historicism as a theoretical tool. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, and in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination. (Emerson, Essay on Shakspere, in

Representative Men)


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It has often seemed strange to lovers of Shakspere that the most genial of dramatists should have written plays which, while not attaining the horror and pathos of tragedy, arouse distaste and even repugnance. Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, despite superb poetry and marvellous delineation of character, are so repellent in theme and treatment that they are seldom represented on the stage today, and seldom lie close to the affection of readers of Shakspere. This is even more the case with All’s Well that Ends Well. “Everyone who reads this play,” says the editor of the Arden Shakespeare volume, “is at first shocked and perplexed by the revolting idea which underlies the plot . . . it leaves so unpleasant a flavour with some people that it is not tasted again.”1 Barrett Wendell put it even more strongly: “There is no other work of Shakspere’s which in conception and in temper seems quite so corrupt as this. . . . There are other works of Shakspere which are more painful; there are none less pleasing, none on which one cares less to dwell.”2 The nature of the plot has kept All’s Well almost completely from representation on the modern stage; Kemble, in his acting version, omitted the central episode of the main action altogether. Not less disagreeable than the plot are many of the characters. Few people can “reconcile their hearts” to Bertram any more than could Dr. Johnson, who found him “a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.” The Clown is one of the least amusing and most foul-mouthed of Shakspere’s comic characters, even with all due license for Elizabethan looseness of language. Parolles is certainly a most unsavory fellow; generally accounted a kind of degraded Falstaff, without the fat knight’s wit and charm. And Helena herself has aroused the sharpest condemnation, which may be contrasted with Coleridge’s famous remark that she is Shakspere’s “loveliest character,” or Hazlitt’s contention that in her conduct “the most scrupulous nicety of female modesty is not once violated.” Dunlop said of Helena that “considering the disparity of rank and fortune it was, perhaps, indelicate to demand as her husband a man from whom she had received no declaration nor proof of attachment; but she certainly overstepped all bounds of female decorum, in pertinaciously insisting on the celebration of a marriage to which he expressed such invincible repugnance . . . she ingratiates herself into the family of a rival, and contrives a stratagem, the success of which could have bound Bertram neither in law nor in honor.”3 Andrew Lang, whose taste and commonsense need not be emphasized, wrote much the same thing in a more vivacious way. “Everyone would prefer to see the worm in the bud feed on the damask cheek rather than to see ‘Venus toute entière à sa proie attachée’, as Helena attaches herself to Bertram. A character in many ways so admirable is debased when Helena becomes a crampon. . . . Had Helena regained her lord


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in a more generous and seemly way, we would still have to pardon the original manner of the wooing.”4 Lounsbury, in a criticism well worth reading, remarks “Nor can any excellence in Helen’s character counterbalance the fundamental fact that she has been untrue to her sex. She persistently pursues a man who is not merely indifferent but averse.”5 John Masefield goes still further; he believes that Shakspere deliberately meant to make Helena despicable. “Helena’s obsession of love makes her blind to the results of her actions. She twice puts the man whom she loves into an intolerable position, which nothing but a king can end. The fantasy is not made so real that we can believe in the possibility of happiness between two so married. Helena has been praised as one of the noblest of Shakespeare’s women. Shakespeare saw her more clearly than any man who has ever lived. He saw her as a woman who practises a borrowed art, not for art’s sake, nor for charity, but, woman fashion, for a selfish end. He saw her put a man into a position of ignominy quite unbearable, and then plot with other women to keep him in that position. Lastly, he saw her beloved all the time by the conventionally minded of both sexes.”6 Even if we do not agree with Helena’s detractors, the plot in which she has so prominent a part is difficult to reconcile with probability. The very title of the play may seem a misnomer. Does all end well? Can a marriage so arranged, an agreement between husband and wife so fulfilled, end happily? “The very nobility of Helena’s nature,” says Lowes, “renders the story which Shakespeare retained less plausible.”7 “It needs all the dramatist’s power to hold our sympathy and to force us to an unwilling assent to the title,” remarks Neilson.8 Oliver Elton expresses a similar thought in a graceful sonnet.9 All’s Well!—Nay, Spirit, was it well that she Thy clear-eyed favorite, the wise, the rare, The ‘rose of youth,’ must her deep heart lay bare, And Helen wait on Bertram’s contumely? Must Love’s own humble, dauntless devotee Make Night accomplice, and, a changeling, dare The loveless love-encounter, and prepare To tread the brink of shame? May all this be And all end well? . . . On the other hand, if those who condemn Helena are right, if, in Andrew Lang’s phrase, she is “the thief, not of love, but of lust,” the chances for a really happy ending seem even smaller. And Bertram is quite as hard to explain psychologically as Helena. After treating his wife with the greatest harshness, setting what he believes impassable barriers to their union, engaging in an intrigue with another


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woman, and “boggling shrewdly” to lie himself out of a tight place, he is apparently transformed in the twinkling of an eye into a model husband. If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever, dearly. But are things going to end well for Bertram any more than for Helena? Many other features of the play might be cited which are unsatisfactory to modern feelings. There seems little need, however, to linger over these at present. Clearly, for us of today, All’s Well perplexes more than it satisfies, and repels more than it attracts. The important thing for us to consider is how such a state of affairs has come about. Two separate issues are involved in the attempt to answer this question: one, the effect of the play upon Shakspere’s audiences and readers; the other, its effect upon modern audiences and readers. These two points have been constantly confused. Shakspere’s marvellous power of making his creations seem real has misled many critics into judging their actions and dispositions as they would those of persons of their own century, or of a timeless immortality belonging to no century, instead of as Elizabethans in various disguises, with all the conventions and traditions of the days of the Virgin Queen. Transcendent as his genius was, it was in no sense independent of his time; on the contrary, it reflected with fidelity the characteristics of his own day. His artistic methods were not those of a modern dramatist, nor were the reactions of an audience in the Globe Theater those of an audience today. Any criticism which fails to take account of these facts is bound to come to shipwreck sooner or later. Most explanations of the alleged faulty psychology of the play, and of its disagreeable tone, completely ignore differences between Elizabethan and modern conditions. The reader will find the much-venerated Gervinus treating the whole piece as a moral allegory on the theme that “merit goes before rank.”10 In allegory, of course, one expects some violence to reason and probability. He will find Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, arguing that Shakspere “sacrificed virtue to convenience,” and in his desire to please, wrote with no moral purpose whatever. He will find Raleigh11 and Schücking12 attributing the apparent psychological shortcomings of the play to Shakspere’s carelessness or creative opulence, “a part of his magnanimity, and a testimony to his boundless resource.” Elton believes that the solution lies in remembering that love is not governed by reason, and that nature works in a wonderful way. In the closing lines of the sonnet from which quotation has already been made, Shakspere defends his work thus: That Spirit, from his seat Elysian, seems to murmur: ‘Sometimes know In Love’s unreason hidden, Nature’s voice;


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In Love’s resolve, Her will; and though his feet Walk by wild ways precipitous, yet, so Love’s self be true, Love may at last rejoice.’ Seccomb and Allen frankly give up the problem: “The plot is a fanciful imbroglio, and the situations, even when they seem most threatening, have no more reality than arabesques; to regard the characters too seriously is merely to court delusion.”13 The object of the following pages is to examine All’s Well from the point of view of Elizabethan story-telling and Elizabethan social conventions. Widespread and favorite narrative material forms the basis of the main plot; by studying this material we may gain some idea of its probable effect when put into dramatic form. We say that the play is disagreeable, but it was at all events liked well enough to be subjected to a process of revision, which shows clearly a lapse of time, and, in the alterations, the deepening of interest in character which marks Shakspere’s later years.14 A play that found no favor would hardly have been so treated. Again, it is necessary to observe how far the supposedly disagreeable qualities are inherent in the story, and how far they are due to Shakspere, or heightened by him. Before we can accuse Shakspere, as Barrett Wendell did, of “treating the fact of love with a cynical irony almost worthy of a modern Frenchman,” we must be sure that the seemingly ironical quality in his work is not susceptible of another explanation. We must reckon with a very different attitude towards moral issues, and a different popular psychology, and we must pay particular attention to what was liked on the stage at the time when All’s Well was written. Moreover, the artistic quality of a piece on the stage, as of a picture on canvas, is often heightened by deepening the shadows; may it not be true that some of the gloom of the play is for dramatic effect? The final results of a critical examination of All’s Well from this point of view are striking. I think it will be clear that Helena was meant by Shakspere to be wholly noble and heroic, and fully justified in her conduct, both in the winning of Bertram and in the manner of fulfilling his conditions for their union after marriage; that the sudden transformation of Bertram from a villain into a model husband was a convention of medieval and Elizabethan story-telling, which must be expected to follow Helena’s triumph; that the blackening of the “hero” and the disagreeable qualities in the Clown and Parolles are explainable for reasons of dramatic contrast and dramatic motivation. It has already been suggested briefly by Thorndike that in the choice and treatment of the themes of the “problem plays” Shakspere was much affected by contemporary literary fashions, on the stage and elsewhere; I hope to make this suggestion seem doubly convincing. I do not seek to prove that the play is a pleasant one, or that it seemed so to the playgoers for whom Shakspere wrote. But I do believe that it is far more unsavory to us than it was to them, and that the effect which it


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was intended to create has been generally misunderstood. In the last analysis, I believe that it reveals quite the reverse of the pessimism with which it has so often been reproached, and justifies the conviction that Shakspere is here, as elsewhere, fundamentally optimistic. Such a study as is here proposed will perform a greater service, if successful, than for this one play alone. It will help to clear up puzzling questions in the sister comedies, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, which, with Hamlet, have been often called “problem plays.” These may not be favorites (with the exception of Hamlet, of course), but they are all extraordinary dramatic achievements, written at the height of Shakspere’s powers, and significant for the light which they throw upon his other work. Through an understanding of the effect of these pieces upon the audiences for whom they were designed, we shall be in a position to appreciate more justly the Roman plays and the supreme achievement of the great tragedies.

Helena and Bertram: The Fulfillment of the Tasks The best approach to an understanding of All’s Well from the Elizabethan point of view is through an examination of the character of Helena. The two chief indictments against her, as we have seen, are that she forces Bertram into a marriage against his will, and that she makes use of unsavory trickery to compel him, once more against his will, to receive her as his wife. We will consider for the present the second indictment, since this forms the chief theme of Shakspere’s play. The main plot of All’s Well is based on the ninth novel of the third day of the Decameron, which Shakspere in all probability got from the faithful translation in Paynter’s Palace of Pleasure.15 In brief, the story as told by Paynter is as follows: Giletta, the daughter of Gerardo of Narbona, physician to the Count of Rossiglione, fell deeply in love with the Count’s son Beltramo. Upon the death of the Count, Beltramo went to Paris, whither Giletta followed him. The King of France was suffering from an illness which no one could cure; Giletta offered to heal him, and if unsuccessful, to submit to being burnt alive. The King proposed, in case the cure were complete, to give her in marriage to some worthy gentleman, to which she assented, reserving, however, the right of choice for herself. The King was healed, whereupon Giletta demanded Beltramo as husband. The young count, “knowing her not to be of a stocke convenable to his nobilitie,” objected, but the King insisted that the marriage be celebrated. After this was over, the Count obtained permission to return to his own country, but instead went to Tuscany, and entered the service of the Florentines against the people of Sienna (the Senois). Giletta


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returned to Rossiglione, where she set the Count’s affairs in order, and then sent two knights to tell him that if it were on her account that he was absenting himself from home, she would herself leave. He replied that she might do as she pleased; that he did not purpose to live with her until she should get upon her finger a ring which he wore, and have a son begotten by him. When this reply was made known to Giletta, she told it to the chief men of Rossiglione, and said that she was unworthy to cause the exile of the Count, and that her purpose was to spend the rest of her life in pilgrimages and devotions. She then made her way to Florence, and lodged in the house of a poor widow. The widow told her that Beltramo was in love with the daughter of a gentlewoman of the city, a neighbor. Giletta went to this gentlewoman, and telling the whole story of her marriage, proposed that the daughter should consent to the Count’s advances, and demand his ring as a pledge, while she herself should take the daughter’s place in bed, and so, by the grace of God, be got with child. So the affair was arranged. The gentlewoman and her daughter were rewarded with a large sum for the latter’s dowry, and rich jewels, and thereupon retired into the country. Beltramo, being called home by his subjects, and hearing that Giletta had left, returned to Rossiglione. Giletta stayed on in Florence, where two sons were born to her. After causing them “carefullie to be noursed and brought up,” she repaired to Montpellier, where Beltramo, on All Saints Day, was entertaining many knights and ladies at a great feast. In pilgrim’s weeds, Giletta entered the hall, her two sons in her arms, and made herself known to her husband, showing him his ring, and claiming the fulfilment of his conditions. The Count asked her to tell how it had come to pass, and she related the whole story. “For whiche cause the counte knowyng the thynges she had spoken to be true (and perceivyng her constaunt minde and good witte, and the twoo faier yonge boies to kepe his promise made, and to please his subjectes, and the ladies that made sute unto him, to accept her from that time forthe as his lawfull wife, and to honour her) abjected his obstinate rigour: causyng her to rise up, and imbraced and kissed her, acknowledgyng her againe for his lawfull wife . . . and from that tyme forthe, he loved and honoured her, as his dere spouse and wife.” Shakspere altered many details of this story,16 and made it more elaborate by the introduction of Parolles and the sub-plot, of the Countess and the Clown and Lafeu, and of a second ring in the final episode. Compared with the ending of the tale, Shakspere’s fifth act is exceedingly complicated. The main theme of the Boccaccio novella enjoyed in the Middle Ages considerable popularity, to which its various forms in prose and verse bear witness.


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There are many analogous stories which are instructive in forming conclusions as to its significance. This theme is briefly as follows: A wife is deserted by her husband, to be taken back on the fulfilment of apparently impossible conditions, one of which is to get a child by him. She performs these tasks, and wins her husband.17 According to Gaston Paris, the source of the story is to be found in the Orient. The following tale, which I summarize, is therefore of special interest. A clever woman was married to a husband who said to her one day, “I cannot stay at home any more, for I must go on a year’s journey to carry on my business.” And he added, laughing, “When I return I expect to find you have built me a grand well; and also, as you are such a clever wife, to see a little son!” The wife got the money by a series of ruses, and had the well dug. She then travelled a long distance in man’s attire, until she found her husband. Then she disguised herself again as a cowherd’s daughter. The husband was attracted by her beauty, but did not recognize her, and proposed marriage. So they were married. At the end of three months he said that he must return. She asked him to give her his old cap and his picture. She then went back to her home, where a son was born to her. On the husband’s arrival, he was not pleased to see the baby, but she showed him the cap and the picture, and told him the whole story, pointing out the new well also. So all ended happily.18 Gaston Paris did not think that an Oriental parallel to the All’s Well theme had been found, and he did not consider Landau’s Indian analogs significant. “Les contes indiens qu’en rapproche M. Landau (Die Quellen des Decamerone, 2e. éd. p. 146 ss) ont une ressemblance plus ou moins éloignée, mais ne présentent pas le trait essentiel du conte, l’ordre, en apparence inéxecutable, donné par le mari à la femme, et executé par elle.”19—But this is in the tale just given, though Landau’s analysis does not show it. Perhaps Paris had not seen the full text of the tale, and was depending upon Landau’s rather misleading outline. He thought the following Turkish story of special importance. A certain prince had a Vizier, who was the father of a twelve-year old daughter. Hearing the maiden’s cleverness praised, the prince called the Vizier to him, and propounded a riddle, which the Vizier was to answer within three days, or lose his head. After three days had passed, and the Vizier could find no answer, his daughter gave him the solution. When the prince was told, he asked who had given the Vizier the answer. At first the Vizier asserted that he himself had guessed the riddle; then he admitted that his daughter had aided him. The prince


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answered, “If that is the case, the maiden will do for my wife.” The girl demanded that before they were married, the prince should bring her a white elephant, and a man without sorrow. The elephant was procured, but the prince, after searching vainly for three years for a man without sorrow, returned home. He then married the Vizier’s daughter, but did not live with her. Instead, he went off hunting, announcing that he should be gone nine years. Upon leaving he gave his wife an empty chest, the mouth of which was sealed with his seal, commanding her to fill it with gold and silver without opening it, and a mare who must give birth to a foal like his black horse. He also told his wife that she must bear a child, instruct him well, and send the child to him, mounted upon the horse. After he had been gone three days, the wife attired herself like a king’s son, dressed up four hundred maidens like men, and rode out after her husband. She pitched her tent near the place where he was staying, thus attracting his attention. Hospitalities were exchanged, the prince not recognizing his wife in disguise. They played checkers in the prince’s tent. The pretended youth proposed that they should play for a stake. So each wagered his horse, saddle, trappings, and seal. The wife won, and retiring to her tent with the seal, she brought the horse and mare together. Opening the chest, she filled it with gold and silver, and sealed it with her husband’s seal. She then sent horse, trappings and seal back to the prince. The next evening, the wife proposed that they play for a girl. She purposely lost, and told the prince that she would send him a beautiful female slave. Retiring to her tent, she then assumed that disguise, and came back to her husband. He was inflamed with love for the supposed slave, and lay that night with her. They drank spirits (Branntwein), and the slave gave the prince a box on the ear. Angry and drunken, he chased the slave away from his tent. The wife then collected her retinue, and returned home. After nine months, nine days and nine hours, she bore a son, whom she had well instructed as he grew older. The mare also bore a foal. At the end of the nine years, the prince returned. His son was placed on the steed, and sent to meet his father. The prince was told that the boy was the son of the Vizier’s daughter. At first he was angry, thinking that the child was not his own. Then the wife showed him the chest, told him that the steed on which the boy was riding was the issue of the mare and his own horse, and related the whole story. “Then the prince was exceedingly joyful over what the maiden had done; because she was exceedingly clever and well-instructed, he exalted her above all his other wives. After he had lived with her a long time, he finally died.”20


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The motivation of the husband’s desertion varies. The Indian tale, “The Clever Wife,” just cited from the collection by Stokes, is unusual in that the husband lays his commands upon his wife as a jest. In the Turkish story there seems to be no reason for the husband’s departure for a nine-year stay, immediately after the marriage, but I am inclined to think that a fuller form of the tale would reveal it as pique for the tasks laid upon him by his wife,21—the procuring of a white elephant and a man who had known no sorrow. Oral circulation frequently obscures the motivation of popular stories. The introductory episode of the Turkish tale, in which the girl wins a husband by her cleverness, should be especially noted. A pretty example of the theme comes from a collection of Norwegian ballads.22 King Kristian goes off to war, and lays three tasks upon his wife. She must build a throne shining like the morning sun, construct a magnificent hall, and have a child by him. She gets advice from an old man. After the accomplishment of the first two tasks, she follows her husband to Scotland in disguise, and is gotten with child by him. The king gives her a ring with his name on it, which serves as a proof of the paternity of the child when he returns home. The strange compilation known as the Mágussaga or the Bragoa-Mágus saga well illustrates the introduction of the episode into a longer narrative. The material in the saga was in large part carried to Iceland by men who had listened to the tales of French minstrels, and after being further altered by oral transmission, was worked up into written form. In its present shape it cannot be earlier than the middle of the thirteenth century. The portion which is of interest for us may be briefly summarized. Hlothver is king of Saxland. One day he asks his counsellor Sigurd whether there is a king equal to him on earth. Sigurd tells him that as long as he lacks a wife and children his power is not complete, and draws his attention to Ermenga, daughter of Hugon of Miklagarth. The marriage is arranged, and Hlothver goes to get his bride. Ermenga paints her face white with chalk-water, and brings Hlothver a roasted cock, asking him to divide it between her and her father and two brothers. Hlothver is annoyed, but divides the cock. He returns to his own land, but remembers the insult. A Danish army is besieging Treviris. Hlothver, on going to war, sets his wife, in revenge for the insult of the division of the cock, three tasks, to be accomplished within three years: she must build a hall, as splendid as that of her father; she must get a stallion, sword and hawk, as costly as those owned by


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Hlothver; she must show him a son of whom he is father and she the mother. She builds the hall. She then gives Sigurd the regency of Saxland, goes to Miklagarth, and brings back sixty warriors to Treviris, which is held by the Danes. She calls herself Jarl Iring of Alimannia, and enters the army of the Danish king. Her brother Hrolf, who is with Hlothver, tells him he has seen a fair maiden looking out of a window of the city. Ermenga, as the maiden, tells Hlothver that she is captive of Jarl Iring and that she is a princess of Frigia, and beseeches him to free her. The king sends for Iring, who consents to give up the captive for the king’s stallion, sword and hawk. She then puts on women’s clothes, and is conducted by Hrolf to the king, who keeps her three nights. She gets possession of the king’s ring. With the help of Hrolf she returns to Saxland, where a son is born to her. The king returns also in due time, and finds that the tasks have been performed. The anger of Hlothver at the division of the cock—a widespread folktheme—is not a plausible reason for the imposition of the tasks. The whole saga, indeed, quite lacks the artistry which transforms varied materials into a unified whole, and is therefore not significant in a study of motivation in medieval storytelling.23 Far finer in every way is the charming prose romance Le Livre du Très Chevalereux Comte d’Artois et de sa Femme.24 This graceful story, which reflects the full tide of chivalry, deserves especial attention. The hero and heroine are historical, but their adventures are fictitious. Philip I of Burgundy, born in 1323, the son of Eudes IV and Jeanne de France, Countess of Artois, married in 1338 the Countess Jeanne of Boulogne, who bore him an heir in 1342. Philip died in 1346. The title “Comte d’Artois” was never properly his; it would have passed to him on the death of his mother, who survived him. The romance appears to have been written in the later fifteenth century for Rodulf, marquis of Axberg, count of Neuchâtel, a friend of the Duke of Burgundy. Devices in the ornamentation make it probable that one manuscript was prepared for the wedding of Rodulf ’s son with Marie of Savoy in 1476. Rodulf himself died in 1487. The important point is that the romance affords a faithful picture of chivalric conventions of the later fifteenth century, and that its purpose is in effect a glorification and exaltation of an earlier Duke of Burgundy and his wife. The theme of All’s Well is much expanded by descriptions of the “grans vaillances” of the noble count, after leaving his wife. These, with the introductory matter preceding the marriage, form considerably more than half of the whole work. The development of the main theme is thus greatly retarded. The Count of Artois was united in marriage to the daughter of the Count of Boulogne, with great pomp and rejoicing. Two or three


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years were happily spent by the couple in their city of Arras, but no child was born to them. This put the Count into a deep melancholy. One day, as he was leaning at a window thinking of this matter, the Countess approached, and asked the reason of his dejection. He replied, “realizing her devotion and good-will towards him,” that he had formed a firm resolution. “This is, that I shall leave this country, and not return to be with you, until three impossible things are accomplished: first, that you be with child by me, and that I know it not; second, that I give you my steed that I love so much, and that I know it not; third and last, that I give you my diamond also, and that I know it not.” Shortly thereafter the Count rode away, leaving his wife behind so sorely afflicted that it was long believed that life had left her body. The adventures of the Count are then related at length. After the first despair of her grief was over, the Countess cast about for means to accomplish the tasks laid upon her. Clad in man’s attire, she set out to find her husband, attended by a faithful vassal named Olivier. Feigning that she was going on a pilgrimage, she followed her husband to Valladolid, where she recognized his lodgings by the arms outside the door. Taking the name of Philipot, she entered his service as page. Sleeping in his chamber, as was the custom, she overhears her husband sighing for the love of the daughter of the king of Castille. She reveals the Count’s love to the duenna of the princess, and also tells the duenna her whole story. They arrange that the Count shall be told that the princess grants him her love, but that in reality the Countess shall be substituted in her place in bed. This is done; the trick is repeated secretly many times, and the Countess is got with child. In her disguise as page, she receives from her husband the diamond, as a reward for her services in the love-affair, and the horse as well, to heal the malady from which the page appears to suffer. The Countess then makes her way back to Arras, where she calls an assembly of the nobles and clergy, and tells them of her accomplishment of the tasks laid upon her by her husband. The Count is sent for by an embassy headed by the Bishop of Arras, who tells him of the fulfilment of the tasks. The Count is deeply impressed by the devotion of his wife, and returns to Arras, where a child is born to them. “There they lived in happy tranquillity for the rest of their lives.” The motivation of the story is not faultless. “The Countess of Artois is abandoned by her husband, who imposes the well-known conditions because, after three years of married life, she has given him no child. It is, therefore, absurd for her to run all the dangers to which she exposes herself, in order to pass one night with her husband, with so problematical a chance of success.”25


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This blemish is very effectually concealed by the charm with which the whole is narrated, however. It is time to consider the bearing of these stories upon the interpretation of All’s Well that Ends Well. In the first place, they exalt the cleverness and devotion of the woman; the wits of the wife are more than a match for those of the husband, and her purpose is a happy reunion with him. There are analogous tales, of a similar significance, of a wife lying incognito with her husband without the imposition of tasks. A pretty Spanish poem26 treats “del engaño que usó la reína doña Maria de Aragon, para qué el rey don Pedro su marido durmiese con ella.” The husband is pleased,27 and summons witnesses. The queen has a child in due course of time. An Egyptian folk-tale tells of the marriage of a girl of the Clever Wench type with a prince. After they are married he refuses to live with her. She disguises herself three times and has three children by him. When he learned the truth he “was very happy and recognized the superiority of his wife . . . and they lived in happiness and prosperity all their lives.”28 In many other analogs an unmarried woman must perform difficult tasks before a man will marry her. The tale of Diarmaid and Graidhne will serve as an illustration; I quote Professor Child’s summary. The Graidhne whom we have seen winning Fionn for husband by guessing his riddles . . . afterwards became enamored of Diarmaid, Fionn’s nephew, in consequence of her accidentally seeing a beauty spot on Diarmaid’s forehead. This had the power of infecting with love any woman whose eye should light upon it: wherefore Diarmaid used to wear his cap well down. Graidhne tried to make Diarmaid run away with her. But he said, “I will not go with thee. I will not take thee in softness, and I will not take thee in hardness; I will not take thee without, and I will not take thee within; I will not take thee on horseback, and I will not take thee on foot.” Then he went and built himself a house where he thought he should be out of her way. But Graidhne found him out. She took up a position between the two sides of the door, on a buck goat, and called to him to go with her. For, said she, “I am not without, I am not within; I am not on foot, and I am not on a horse; and thou must go with me.” After this Diarmaid had no choice.29 Very numerous are the tales in which the Clever Wench gives more than one proof of her wit; first, before marriage, and then after her union to the desirable husband, generally of high station, whom her adroitness has won for her.30 Among these tales is, of course, the novella of Boccaccio which serves as a basis for Shakspere’s play. The immediate source of the novella remains to be discovered.


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In the second place, the husband, in the tales of married heroines with which we are chiefly concerned, accepts the situation as an evidence of his wife’s courage and love. Nowhere is there a suggestion that he regards himself as having been despicably tricked. Many of the tales emphasize his pleasure at the outcome. And his rejoicing has a good foundation, for all these couples seem, in the good old way, “to live happily ever after.” The merits of the wife bring their reward. In the Romance of the Count of Artois, the duenna, whom the count interviews before returning home, in order to learn from her the whole truth, puts the matter plainly. “Par foy, sire, fait-elle, le celer ne vous vault riens; si vous jure en ma conscience qu’à la plus léale et meilleure dame de quoy l’en puist tenir parole estez-vous mariés; et bien l’a monstré quant pour vostre amour a enduré telle peine qui ne puet à dame estre pareille, durant sa queste ennuyeuse, laquelle jà n’eust achevée ne fust sa science et bonne conduicte; si me fist son fait si grant pitié avoir au cuer, qu’à luy aidier ay mis l’onneur de ma dame et mon bien en adventure, dont il n’est en riens mesvenu, pour quoy je loue Dieu et la benoite vierge Marie sa prècieuse mère, à qui je prie qu’ilz veullent changier vostre vouloir en telle manière que ce soit à la joye de ma dame la contesse d’Artois, qui si léalment vous ayme que bien vous en doit souvenir à toutes heures.”31 In the sources of All’s Well, then, we recognize a Virtue-Story, exalting the devotion of a woman to the man who so far forgets his duty as to treat her cruelly. Analogs of other kinds will occur to the reader immediately; the adventures of Griselda or Fair Annie, in which a husband comes to realize the fidelity of his wife after she has been subjected to the most trying of proofs, the ballad of Child Waters, in which the heroine, though pregnant, is forced to follow her lover’s horse on foot before the man relents, the Nut-Brown Maid, which exhibits various tests of the woman’s fidelity, ending with the moral, Here may ye see that wimen be In love, meke, kinde, and stable. All this directly contradicts the argument that the actions of Helena in regaining her husband would not have seemed deserving of admiration. There is in Shakspere’s play, to be sure, no formal recognition of Helena’s devotion and cleverness. The reason for this is clear; it has been crowded out in order to sustain the dramatic suspense by making things seem to go against the heroine up to the last moment. Of all this there is no suggestion in Boccaccio’s tale. Bertram is betrothed to Lafeu’s daughter, and gives a ring as a token. The King recognizes it as having belonged to Helena. Bertram denies this, saying it was thrown him from a window in Florence. He is led away, and a letter from Diana is read, stating that Bertram promised to marry her. Bertram is brought back, and the Widow and Diana both pray that the King will have the marriage performed. With insulting words, Bertram denies any obligation to Diana. She then shows


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the ring, which Bertram admits was his, and offers to return it, if he will give her her own. She says it is like the ring upon the finger of the King, and that she gave it to Bertram in bed. Bertram confesses the ring was hers, and Parolles says that Bertram promised to marry Diana. The King asks Diana where she got the ring; she answers in riddles, and at last sends for Helena, who produces the ring. This complicated series of mistakes is far more dramatic as material for a fifth act than the pretty scene in the French romance in which husband and wife are united, or the elaborate banquet-setting in Boccaccio’s tale. After these mistakes are all resolved, the final reconciliation of Bertram and Helena is curiously brief and bald, even more so than in Cymbeline, when Posthumus and Imogen are at last united. Other reasons for this brevity of treatment in All’s Well will appear presently. Here the point to observe is that for dramatic reasons the Virtue Story quality, so evident in the analogues, is somewhat disguised in Shakspere’s dénouement. We are now in a position to refute the assertion that Helena is guilty of indelicate persistence in pursuing the man who has rebuffed her. Just such persistence, such single-eyed devotion to a good object, irrespective of all other considerations, was regarded as meritorious. It is one of the most striking features of the Virtue Stories. As Hales says of the tale of Griselda, “the story does not contemplate the virtue it celebrates in reference to other virtues. It does not concern itself with these; in its devotion to its one object, it may even outrage some of them.”32 I have already pointed out the importance of a proper understanding of this matter, in a discussion of the wager-plot in Cymbeline.33 That a virtue might be carried too far, or that it might transgress the most elementary demands of common-sense and decency in making for its goal, seems to have been little regarded in medieval story. Fantastic exaggerations were common, and due allowance must be made for these exaggerations when we find them woven into the fabric of Shakspere’s plays. Equally untenable, in the light of early analogs, is the idea that the bed-trick is immodest, unworthy of a refined woman. There is never the least intimation in these analogs that the heroine, in thus proving her devotion, is doing an immodest thing. The answer would have been: she is lying with her husband, as any chaste wife has a right to do. The objection that delicacy would prevent her from doing so under false pretences would have been met by an Elizabethan, partly by the obvious point that she has to do so in order to fulfil her husband’s conditions, and partly by the conviction, which we have just noted, that virtue should stick at nothing in pursuing its course. Would the elegant chronicler of the adventures of the Count of Artois, writing in the late fifteenth century, in order to compliment the houses of Burgundy and Artois, have attributed this ruse to the elegant and virtuous Countess if it had seemed indelicate? Would Shakspere, in Measure for Measure, have made the ensky’d and sainted Isabella, the gentle forsaken Mariana, and the benevolent Duke use a similar stratagem if it had been felt repugnant to modesty?


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What, now, as to the psychological adequacy of the ending of the play? Shall we conclude that “the triumph of Helena’s love will be merely external,” that a union so brought about will never be happy? To argue thus is to miss the whole point of the Faithful Wife theme, whether in medieval and Renaissance analogs, or in Shakspere. No matter how harsh the treatment of the woman by the man, no matter how unsuited they may seem to each other, it is a convention of the Virtue-Story that they “live happily ever after.” Ful many a yeer in heigh prosperitee Liven these two in concord and in reste, says Chaucer, after the trials of Griselda are over. After their reunion, the Count of Artois and his wife “vesquirent en bonne transquillité le résidu du temps qu’ils avoient à vivre.” So Beltramo lived with Giletta, “come sua sposa e moglie onorando, l’amò e sommamente ebbe cara.” In the cold light of reason, these endings may not seem destined to bring happiness. So one may argue that Cophetua and the Beggar Maid would have had little in common; she might have longed to exchange palace etiquet for the delightful freedom of begging on the street. Would the Prince have really been happy with Cinderella, obviously of a very different social station, just because she happened to have a small foot? The answer is, of course he would; the cold light of reason is no guide in stories. The fulfilment of the task is not a logical settlement of the dislike or indifference of the man for the woman, but it has perfect validity in a tale. Bertram, in setting the tasks for Helena, was really only stating in picturesque fashion that he would never live with her. “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband, but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never.’” Dorigen in the Franklin’s Tale sets an impossible condition, as she thinks, in order to get rid of an importunate wooer, like the ladies in the analogous tales in the Filocolo and the Decameron. But when the seemingly impossible is accomplished, the promise has to be kept. In the tales which we have just been examining, the accomplishment of the tasks, like the fitting of the slipper on Cinderella’s foot, seems miraculously to melt away all reluctance on the part of the promiser. The inconsequence of fairy tales in this regard has been delightfully satirized by Barrie, in A Kiss for Cinderella. The Prince is very bored with the whole business, and as Cinderella advances for the trial he says, “Oh, bother!” (These words are the last spoken by him in his present state. When we see him again, which is the moment afterwards, he is translated. He looks the same, but so does a clock into which new works have been put. The change is effected quite simply by Cinderella delicately raising


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her skirt and showing him her foot. As the exquisite nature of the sight thus vouchsafed him penetrates his being, a tremor passes through his frame; his vices take flight from him and the virtues enter. It is a heady wakening, and he falls at her feet.) “His vices take flight from him and the virtues enter.” Could anything more perfectly describe what happens to Bertram at the end of the play than this? Or what happens to the men whom Julia, Hero, Mariana, Celia, Imogen, and other pure and beautiful heroines marry? “We are astonished,” says Creizenach, “how easily in these closing scenes the wrong-doers are pardoned, even when through their criminal devices they have conjured up the greatest dangers. . . . Furthermore, it often happens that in the closing scenes attempts at poisoning and the like are no longer reprehended. The most unbelievable forgiveness in this regard is that of the innocent and suffering women, who in many such pieces are forsaken by their husbands for a mistress, or even pursued with attempt to kill. Conclusions about the moral convictions and feelings of the dramatists cannot be drawn from these scenes:34 they are obviously a part of the style of the romantic and unrealistic drama, as in comedy, where all ends with general happiness; we shall also notice examples of such ready forgiveness in Spanish comedies.”35 The reason why occurrences of this sort in drama were confined to no one region is that the conventions of story-telling which produced them were the common traditions of the various countries of Western Europe. I imagine that some readers of the preceding pages have questioned whether the general critical method here pursued is sound, whether the conventions of the Middle Ages may properly be applied to literature of the age of Elizabeth. I would urge that in very large measure those conventions do hold, and that they may be properly applied in criticism. Indeed, I believe that they illuminate much which is otherwise difficult of explanation. The false connotations of the word “medieval” are still very potent, however. Many people still balk at the idea that anything medieval can really be significant for such a glorious “modern” as Shakspere. The real modernity of the Middle Ages is only just coming to be fully understood. “The more we know of the conditions of those times,” says Dr. Foakes-Jackson, “the plainer does it become that our problems are often the same under different names, and that even modern views, which pass for being advanced, have their counterpart in those days.”36 Certainly this must be even truer of the Elizabethan era, which was so much closer to the Middle Ages than we are. I will quote from a private letter from one of the most distinguished of English Shakspere critics, in connection with medieval elements in Shakspere. “It is only the best scholars (and some simple human beings quite unscholarly) who do not fall into the trap presented by the words ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Medieval.’ The Middle Ages were inhabited, not by a strange people across a dark frontier, but by ourselves. The frontier was built (and the name invented) by the arrogance


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of the newly intoxicated Renaissance. There are differences, of course, but chiefly in the means and methods of civilization, and especially in the literary art. They accepted a story, and told it, as a story, without critical preoccupations.” I have already urged the importance of a study of the survival of medieval chivalric ideas, in criticising Cymbeline and Troilus and Cressida.37 Posthumus Leonatus has been blamed by generations of critics for the wager which he makes on his wife’s honor, yet when the story is carefully examined, it becomes clear that according to the social convictions of Shakspere’s day, Posthumus could have acted in no other fashion. Boas has well emphasized the medieval conception of “service” in All’s Well. “[Helena] feels throughout that as a dependent of the great house she stands in a feudal relation to Bertram, and that in return for the protection extended to her, she owes him, in the technical sense, ‘service.’”38 The reader may follow the development of this argument at his leisure; he will note how completely it disposes of the conclusions of Gervinus. Due allowance has to be made for changes in the Elizabethan attitude towards chivalry; Troilus and Cressida marks a distinct shift in the point of view. But this does not mean that Shakspere had reached anything like our modern convictions about social ethics. He was on the whole far nearer to the days of Chaucer than to those of Tennyson. The traditions of the Middle Ages were just as strong in Shakspere’s day in popular as in chivalric tradition,—in tales transmitted orally in ballad form and in prose narrative among the unlettered, in narratives in the spirit of the fabliaux, in folk-lore, and in cheap printed texts preserving the favorite stories of earlier times. It is a commonplace that Shakspere utilized much of this material. But he took over not merely “the story”; he was influenced very deeply by current traditions as to what the story meant, and how it was to be interpreted. The spirit as well as the substance of medieval narrative entered vitally into his plays. He was a man peculiarly close to the people, in birth, education, and the conditions of his craft as actor and author. He knew perfectly well what tales his audiences were familiar with, and when he put one of these, or an analogous story, upon the stage, he had to make his work conform in large measure to the way in which the spectators would naturally understand it. His part was not to alter radically events or motivation, but to make the personages in the story seem so real, by his marvellous power of characterization, and to set them in such effective dramatic action, that the whole gained new life, new vividness, new interest. This goes far to explain the sharp contrast which the modern reader feels between the improbability of many of Shakspere’s plots, and his extraordinary knowledge of human nature. Are we to suppose that he did not perceive such incongruities? Not at all; he must have known that a girl like Portia would hardly have staked her life’s happiness upon a silly business like the choice of the caskets, nor Viola, shipwrecked upon a foreign coast, have decided to serve the reigning duke in the guise of a eunuch. But the conventions of story were so strong with


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him and with his audience that these incongruities troubled him and them far less than they do us. They really disturb modern audiences but little, for we still have similar conventions in story and drama today. The poor girl who marries the rich youth who has tried to seduce her, and finally reformed, is a familiar type in cheap fiction and in melodrama, and the general conclusion is that she is extremely lucky to marry a man of better social station and abundant funds, no matter what his actions have been. The moral eighteenth century wept copiously over Pamela’s trials, but envied her final good fortune. The “happy land, where things come right” on the stage and in romance39 will probably be with us for a long time yet, and the critic, with all his devotion to logic and reason, must make his judgments conform in large measure to its accepted improbabilities. The real objection of many critics to the conduct of Helena lies, I think, in having a heroine mixed up in what is to modern ideas an unsavory sexual intrigue. They are disturbed at Helena’s badinage with Parolles about virginity, and even see in it a deliberate coarsening of her character. It seems rather trite to remark that the Elizabethan attitude towards such matters was quite different from our own. A little reading of the contemporary drama of Webster, Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, and the rest is one of the best correctives to setting too high a standard of delicacy in this period. Even in Shakspere, who is far more decent than any of them, one is often surprised at the tone of conversation and jesting in mixed company as to marital relations, the getting of children, cuckoldry, indecencies of dress, and the like. There really seems to be no need to collect a floralegium of unfragrant passages to prove the point. Perhaps the Elizabethans were no worse than ourselves, but their social conventions and taboos were quite different. We do not think a plot that turns upon the substitution of a woman in bed is very suitable matter for the stage today, nor that it is very pleasant to have the girl who engages all our sympathy made the center of it, but the frequency with which the theme was used in early times in narrative and in Elizabethan days upon the stage shows how very differently people then felt. Many good critics have been led astray by forgetfulness of these considerations and of the social arrangements of the Elizabethan age. For example, Schücking, in the excellent book to which reference has already been made, is very severe with Mariana for accepting the proposal made to her by Isabella, at the suggestion of the Duke of Vienna. Unheard-of, unspeakable demand upon the honor of a betrothed and forsaken girl! Does she not hesitate? Are not the others obliged to have recourse to conjurations and tears, to fall upon their knees and implore her? Not at all; she is immediately willing to catch the faithless Angelo in the bed of love at night as in a trap. One sees with astonishment how lightly the self-respect of a woman is here estimated. This solution corresponds to the convictions of the fourteenth century, when


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Boccaccio was alive. It arises, as far as its moral elevation is concerned, from the middle and lower social orders of the Middle Ages, but certainly not from the convictions of the seventeenth century, which was just then beginning, the ideas of which about woman, as they appear to us in Overbury, Hall, and others, reveal in comparison a noticeable elevation. Is one to suppose that Shakespeare, who shows in other places such immeasurably fine feeling for human dignity, had no sense of the riskiness (Bedenklichkeit) of this solution of the play? Schücking’s answer is that Shakspere was guilty here, and in Much Ado, All’s Well, and the Winter’s Tale, of “neglect of his highest powers” and of seeking “the easiest solution.”40 It is to be remembered that Mariana, though not married to Angelo, was betrothed to him, and that this betrothal was then held to have much the binding force of a full marriage ceremony, and to confer certain of its rights.41 Again, a little reflection on the themes of aristocratic literature in the Middle Ages will convince anyone that this ruse, to which Schücking objects, is not specially characteristic of the middle or lower social orders. We have just seen it attributed, in a medieval romance of the most courtly type, to a lady whom the writer particularly desired to compliment. Everyone knows that chivalric love sanctioned and even exalted much which would seem degrading to a woman today, and that many episodes in the most aristocratic of romances do not square with modern ideas of feminine purity. But this is not the main point. The important thing is that Shakspere’s plays are to be judged, not by the works of Hall or Overbury, who wrote for a small circle, and were in no wise representative of the general thought of their time, but by the literature with which the audiences of Shakspere were familiar, literature which had proved its right to be remembered through generations of men, high and low, rich and poor. An admirable means of getting an idea of this literature is afforded by the list of books in Captain Cox’s library, which may be conveniently found in Furnivall’s delightful edition of Robert Laneham’s Letter,42 a list which affords, as the editor puts it, “a view of the literature in which the reading members of the English middle class in Elizabeth’s time were brought up.” The good captain, who had “great ouersight in matters of storie,” read chiefly romances and popular tales, like Huon of Bordeaux, Bevis of Hampton, The Squire of Low Degree, The Tale of the Widow Edyth, The Nutbrown Maid, Sir Eglamour, a variety of traditional ballads and popular songs, a few “auncient playz,” and miscellaneous material, ranging from The Hy Wey to the Spitlhouse to Doctor Boord’s breuiary of Health. The plays of Shakspere were written in large measure for the Captain Coxes of his day, and for the even less educated fellows who crowded the pit of his theater and upon whose pleasure the success of any public play largely depended. An appeal to the more cultured in the galleries and on the stage was no less possible; but


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such subtleties as appealed to them did not bother the vulgar, any more than they disturb people today who like Hamlet or Othello chiefly as melodrama. If the finest things in the plays of Shakspere were not for the groundlings, the bone and sinew of them, the simple broad lines of the story, could be understood by just this class, and were meant to be. Some exception must, of course, be made in the case of plays obviously designed for court circles, but All’s Well was not one of these. The piece which we are discussing did not mean one thing to Captain Cox and another to a man like the Earl of Southampton; it merely carried the more cultured man further, into a region of thought and emotion and artistic appreciation which the plainer citizen could not penetrate. The artistic purpose of All’s Well will be considered later more in detail. Meanwhile we may gather up the threads of the preceding argument. It is clear that, from the point of view of narrative traditions and social ethics in Shakspere’s day, the conduct of Helena in fulfilling the conditions set by Bertram for their union was admirable; that she showed cleverness, devotion and courage; that she was guilty neither of immodesty nor of unwomanly persistency; and that the “happy ending” was accepted as a convention of drama because it was also a convention of story-telling. But what of the opening scenes? Does a similar method of investigation exonerate Helena from the charge of unworthy conduct in forcing Bertram into a marriage which he does not desire? Again, from the point of view of Shakspere’s own day, I think Helena is guiltless. The whole matter deserves separate consideration, and must be treated by itself, though fortunately it may be disposed of more rapidly than the episode which has just been analyzed. NOTES 1. W. Osborne Brigstocke; Introduction to All’s Well, p. xv. 2. William Shakspere, N. Y., 1901, p. 250. 3. History of Prose Fiction, London, 1888, Vol. II, p. 86. 4. Harper’s Magazine, Vol. LXXXV (1892) p. 213. 5. Shakespeare as Dramatist and Moralist, N. Y. 1901, p. 390. 6. William Shakespeare, N. Y., 1911, p. 147 f. 7. Introduction to All’s Well, Tudor Shakespeare, p. xiii. 8. Neilson and Thorndike, The Facts about Shakespeare, N. Y., 1913, p. 83. 9. A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, London, 1916, p. 161. 10. Shakespeare Commentaries, tr. by F. E. Bunnett, N. Y., 1875, p. 180. 11. Shakespeare (English Men of Letters) N. Y., 1907, p. 140. 12. Die Charakterprobleme bei Shakespeare. Leipzig, 1919, pp. 196 ff. 13. Age of Shakespeare, London, 1903, Vol. II, pp. 81 f. 14. The most thorough study of this process of revision has been made by Professor J. L. Lowes, to whom I am indebted for friendly counsel. Through his kindness, I have been privileged to examine the unpublished MS. of this study, and to utilize some of its results here. It is noteworthy, in connection with the point made above, that according to Professor Lowes, Bertram, the most unpleasant character in the main plot, was not retouched. The chief alterations made Helena


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more womanly and less girlish. Some of the conclusions of Professor Lowes are summarized in his edition of the play for the Tudor Shakespeare (pp. vii ff.). He believes that the play was first written “from 1598 to 1600 or 1601,” and worked over “at a date very near that of the latest tragedies, and not long (if at all) before the Romances—say 1606–1608.” 15. It does not seem likely that both Shakspere and Paynter would independently have called the people of Sienna “the Senois.” Attempts have been made to show that Shakspere used the Virginia of Bernardo Accolti (eds. 1513, 1535), an Italian tragi-comedy based on Boccaccio. Cf. Klein, Geschichte des Dramas, Leipzig, 1866, IV., 546–589; Bodenstedt, ed. Shakspere, Leipzig, 1871, XXXIV, v–xii; H. von der Hagen, Über die altfranzösische Vorstufe des Shakespear’chen Lustspiels Ende Gut, Alles Gut. Halle diss. Gaston Paris (Romania, VIII, 636) does not think that Hagen has made out a case for the dependence of Shakespere upon Accolti. Lowes (Tudor Shakespeare, p. x) says that “the evidence for it is entirely unconvincing.” In the present study no further mention will be made of Accolti’s play. 16. For the reader’s convenience, I quote the following from Lowes’s edition of the play: “The Countess, Parolles, the Clown and Lafeu are all added; Giletta of the story is rich, has refused many suitors, and has kinsfolk of her own; on her arrival in Paris, her first step is to see Beltramo; the King and not Giletta suggests as her reward the bestowal upon her of a husband, whom Giletta merely requests, thereupon, that she may choose; the choice of Beltramo is not made in his presence, but he is called in later to hear of it; after Beltramo’s desertion (which is not motivated beforehand, as in the play), Giletta returns to Rossiglione, and devotes herself to the care and improvement of Beltramo’s estate, rendering herself greatly beloved by his subjects; as Beltramo does not return, Giletta sends him word that she is willing to leave Rossiglione, should that insure his return, and it is in reply to this message of Giletta that Beltramo writes his letter; when Giletta leaves, she does so publicly, telling her subjects that she has determined to spend the rest of her days in pilgrimages and devotion; the widow at whose house she stays in Florence is not Diana’s mother, but a neighbor of her mother, who is also a widow and a gentlewoman; Giletta remains in Florence, after Beltramo has returned home, until the birth of twin sons; in the dénouement neither Diana nor the King is present, but Giletta simply appears, in poor apparel, with her two sons in her arms, at a feast which Beltramo is giving, and weeping, claims her rights; there is no mention whatever of a second ring.” Professor Lowes is in error in saying that Beltramo’s desertion is not motivated beforehand; it is clearly due to Giletta’s lower birth, which was not “convenable to his nobilitie.” 17. The sources of Boccaccio are discussed by M. Landau, Die Quellen des Decamerone, Stuttgart, 1884, and A. C. Lee, The Decameron: its Sources and Analogues, London, 1909. Neither book is satisfactory. Landau’s analyses of tales are so brief as often to be misleading, and the relationships of such tales to each other and to the main story are often too superficially disposed of. It is impossible to give such complicated questions brief treatment with satisfactory results. Lee’s book, which is heavily indebted to Landau, suffers in a similar way. Both are useful for bibliographical references, and may be used to supplement the material here quoted. Landau has a particular fondness for tracing the origins of the novelle to India, sometimes on the basis of slight resemblances. 18. Maive Stokes, Indian Fairy Tales, London, 1880. “The Clever Wife,” Tale XXVIII, p. 216.


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All’s Well That Ends Well 19. Romania, XVI, 98., note. Some discussion of Eastern parallels—not particularly satisfactory—will be found in The Remarks of M. Karl Simrock on the Plots of Shakespeare’s Plays, with Notes and Additions by J. O. Halliwell, London, (The Shakespeare Society), 1850, pp. 95 ff. 20. W. Radloff, Proben der Volkslitteratur der nördlichen türkischen Stämme, Vol. VI, Dialect der Tarantschi. St. Petersburg, 1886. “Die Kluge Wesirs-Tocher,” pp. 191–198. 21. Cf. the Mágussaga, below. Anger at the division of the cock, which is imposed upon Hlothver by his bride Ermenga, leads to his setting her the tasks which form the main theme of the episode. 22. M. B. Landstad, Norske Folkeviser, Christiania, 1853. “Kong Kristian og hans dronning,” No. LXXIII, pp. 585 ff. 23. Cf. Paul’s Grundriss, Strassburg, 1901–1909, II, 874. Especially useful is H. Suchier, “Die Quellen der Mágussaga,” Germania, XX (1875), 273–291. For references to the division of the cock, see J. Bolte and G. Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder-und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, Leipzig, 1915, II, 360. I have depended for the above summary on Suchier’s fuller analysis, pp. 275 ff. 24. The edition by J. Barrois, Paris, 1837, is a joy to read, with its clear type approximating in form to the fifteenth-century letters, and its reproductions of the excellent drawings in the MS,—excellent despite obvious faults of perspective and proportion. A good idea of the distribution of the material may be gained from the summaries of the contents of each section of the romance. As to the character of the material, the editor remarks, “L’ouvrage qui nous occupe ne sauroit donc être considéré comme historique qu’en ce sens qu’il retrace les aventures d’un personnage réel, dont la plupart des actions ont été imaginées d’après ce qui se passoit sous les yeux de l’auteur, et narrées de manière à impressionner l’esprit de ses contemporains.” (p. xxii) For biographical details, see the Introduction, pp. ix, xvii. 25. Gaston Paris, loc. cit. It should be observed, however, that the intimacy of the Count and Countess extends over a considerable time in the romance, not a single night. Cf. Barrois, p. 171. 26. F. J. Wolf, Über eine Sammlung spanischer Romanzen in fliegenden Blättern auf der Universitäts-Bibliothek zu Prag, Wien, 1850, p. 42. 27. El rey quedó del engaño con muy grande admiracion; pero como era discreto por ello no se enojó. 28. Antin-Pacha: Contes populaires de la Vallée du Nil, Paris, 1895, “La Fille du Menusier,” tale XX, p. 239. 29. Engl. and Scot. Popular Ballads, I, 8. The whole of this introduction to the ballad of the Elfin Knight may be read with profit. 30. Cf. Bolte and Volívka’s analysis of Grimm’s tale “Die kluge Bauerntochter,” loc. cit., II, 349 ff., which tells of the girl’s cleverness both before and after marrying the king. A very large number of variants are registered. The whole discussion of this story by Bolte and Volívka serves to show how complicated a study of the sources of Boccacio’s novella might be made, and how impossible any such exhaustive study would be here. 31. Barrois, pp. 188 f. 32. Percy Folio Manuscript, ed. Hales and Furnivall, III, 422. 33. P.M.L.A., XXXV, 407. 34. Italics mine.


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35. Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas, Halle, 1909, IV, 306 ff. I am indebted for this reference to Schücking. 36. An Introduction to the History of Christianity, New York, 1921, p. vii. 37. For the paper on Cymbeline, see above, note 33; for that on Troilus and Cressida, Shakesperian Studies, New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1916, pp. 187 ff. 38. Shakespeare and His Predecessors, p. 350. 39. See the charming essay by Brander Matthews, “The Pleasant Land of Scribia,” in The Principles of Playmaking. New York, 1919, pp. 133 ff. 40. See above, note 12, and cf. pp. 196, 199, 201, of Schücking’s book. 41. Note what is said in the play: “She should this Angelo have married; was affianced to him by oath, and the nuptial appointed.” But she lost her dowry, so Angelo “left her in her tears,” pretending to find dishonor in her. Nevertheless, she still loved him. The Duke reassures Mariana, Nor, gentle daughter, fear you not at all. He is your husband on a pre-contract: To bring you thus together, ’tis no sin, Sith that the justice of your title to him Doth flourish the deceit (Act IV, Sc. I). and he tells Isabella that she may “most uprighteously do a poor wronged lady a merited benefit.” The importance of the betrothal in Shakspere’s plays has not been sufficiently recognized. I have already discussed it in connection with Cymbeline (Publications, loc. cit., p. 412, note). Furness conjectures that the union of Imogen with Posthumus was merely a betrothal or “handfasting,” though it was to Imogen as holy as marriage, and it had clearly brought with it full marital rights, cf. Act II, Sc. V, I. 9. Furness’s view is that if the couple had been united by the full marriage ceremony, the wooing of Cloten and the urging of his suit by the queen would have been impossible. In this connection the definition of “handfasting” cited by the New English Dictionary from Jamieson, 1808–1825, may be repeated. “To handfast, to betrothe by joining hands, in order to cohabitation [sic] before the celebration of marriage.” Consider also Claudio’s union with Juliet in Measure for Measure, which was to be regarded as legal according to the current practice. upon a true contract I got possession of Julietta’s bed. You know the lady, she is fast my wife, Save that we do the denunciation lack Of outward order. They had waited on account of the dowry. Meanwhile the sudden revival of an ancient and neglected law resulted in Claudio’s arrest. We do not need to take this statute too seriously; law in Shakspere’s romances is often queer stuff. One thinks of Shakspere’s own union with Anne Hathaway, which may have been of the sort here discussed. The comments of Dr. W. J. Rolfe (article Shakespeare in the Encyclopedia Americana, ed. of 1904) are worth quoting. “The marriage [of Shakspere] had evidently been a hurried one, urged on by the relatives of the bride, but apparently not favored by those of the bridegroom, who could not honorably avoid it, and seems not to have been inclined to do so. Some biographers believe that the couple


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had been formally betrothed some months before the marriage, according to the custom of the time; and this is by no means improbable. The betrothal was then a legal ceremony, consisting in the interchange of rings, kissing, and joining hands, in the presence of witnesses, and often before a priest. Violation of the contract was punished by the ecclesiastical law with excommunication; and the betrothal was a legal bar to marriage with another person, except by the joint consent of the parties. In Shakespeare’s time, at least among the common people, it was often regarded as conferring the rights and privileges of the more formal union that was to follow; but later in the century the Church authorities condemned this license. There may have been such a pre-contract, or betrothal, in the case of William and Ann. In the absence of any positive testimony to the contrary, it is no more than fair to allow them the benefit of the doubt. It is an interesting fact that this ancient betrothal is introduced by Shakespeare in at least seven of his plays,—‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘The Winter’s Tale’ (twice), ‘Much Ado,’ ‘Measure for Measure,’ and ‘King John.’ In ‘Twelfth Night,’ Olivia, who has been betrothed to Sebastian, supposing him to be the disguised Viola, addresses the latter as ‘husband,’ and justifies herself by appealing to the priest before whom the ceremony had been performed, with the understanding that it was to be kept secret until the marriage should take place. Similarly, Robert Arden, the poet’s maternal grandfather, in a legal document, calls his daughter Agnes the wife (uxor) of the man to whom she was married three months later.” 42. In The Shakespeare Library, New York, 1907. Cf. pp. v and xii.

QQQ 1951—E.M.W. Tillyard. From Shakespeare’s Problem Plays Tillyard (1889–1962), one of the most prominent Shakespeareans of the mid-twentieth century, authored the seminal The Elizabethan World Picture (1944). In the following extract, taken from his book-length study of Shakespeare’s problem plays, Tillyard is not particularly concerned with forwarding any one central argument or thesis about the play. Rather, he performs the task of “assessing” the play so commonly termed a “failure,” weighing its flaws and virtues through careful and close reading. While he labors to counter a number of common critiques of the play, All’s Well That Ends Well nonetheless remains for him an interesting failure. In particular, Tillyard’s central charge against the play is rooted in a formalist reading of Shakespeare’s language and imagery. The playwright’s imagination, Tillyard argues, never fully ignites in the play, and “there is no steady warmth pervading the whole creation.” On the other hand, Tillyard promotes several key virtues of the play, particularly the idea that Bertram and Helena are psychologically complex, richly drawn characters.


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It is agreed that All’s Well is in some sort a failure. But there are many kinds of failure, some dull some interesting, some tame some heroic, some simple some complicated. The failure of All’s Well is not indeed heroic, like that of Measure for Measure, but it is interesting and it is complicated: well worth the attempt to define. But perhaps it is premature to talk of failure. Fail the play does, when read: but who of its judges have seen it acted? Not I at any rate; and I suspect that it acts far better than it reads. For one thing it is very well plotted; and in the usual Shakespearean manner. The main outlines of the opening position are set forth quickly and emphatically in the first act. We learn what has just happened at Rossillion, the natures of the chief characters, and the mainspring of the whole action, Helena’s passion for Bertram. That passion drives her to Paris to try her luck; and the second act mounts to a swift climax in the two long scenes where Helena first persuades the French King to try her remedy and then claims her reward in the hand of Bertram, only to gain the show and not the substance of her wishes. The middle of the play, as so often in Shakespeare, is filled with preparatory action rather than fruition, with the process of incubation not of birth. But this process proceeds with firm logic from the more crowded and open events of the first two acts. In Florence, in the fourth act, events again thicken and gather speed. They culminate in the long third scene, which takes place at night. Here Bertram is assailed by one surprise or excitement after another. He receives a very disturbing letter from his mother, he hears of the French King’s strong resentment at some of his actions, he thinks that he has triumphed in his illicit courtship of Diana, only to have his relationship with her altered and endangered by the supposed news that his wife is dead, and he finds he has been deceived in his friend and adviser Parolles. But he does not know the full truth, namely that his wife is alive and had substituted herself for Diana that very night. The last act works out all the things that result from the full truth’s being revealed. This admirable construction, which I cannot remember to have seen sufficiently praised, might be more evident on the stage than in the study and might ensure for the play a position far higher than its present one, should it ever force its way into the repertory that enjoys regular presentation. But on the only available criterion, that of reading, it remains true that in its total effect All’s Well fails and that the failure is caused most obviously by the comparative feebleness of execution. This is not to deny the skill in plotting, but the effect and the virtue of plotting vary according to the success of other parts of a composition. If I may quote something I wrote before The virtue of the plot only begins when other qualities are already there. Many modern detective stories are ephemeral in spite of excellent plotting. . . . But that does not mean that plot is never important. Easy though it is for a cool self-possessed mind to plot ingeniously, it


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becomes a matter of greater difficulty and greater importance when the imagination grows hot. The cool brain has no temptations not to plot well, but without these temptations plotting well amounts to nothing.1 And the trouble with All’s Well is that though Shakespeare’s imagination does grow warm at times and at a few points genuinely incandescent, there is no steady warmth pervading the whole creation. And this lack of imaginative warmth shows in a defective poetical style. I will quote two examples of Shakespeare’s imagination half-kindled but only half and hence not succeeding. The first is from the play’s first scene and is spoken by Helena of Parolles, after she has soliloquised on her love for Bertram and when she sees Parolles approaching: Who comes here? One that goes with him. I love him for his sake, And yet I know him a notorious liar, Think him a great way fool, solely a coward. Yet these fixt evils sit so fit in him That they take place, when virtue’s steely bones Look bleak i’ th’ cold wind. Withal full oft we see Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly. These lines act on us as Chapman often does. They raise high expectations, creating a promising sense of afflatus, and yet fail to fulfil them. There is something very striking about virtue’s steely bones looking bleak in the cold wind, but what strikes initially is an irrelevant image: bones or a skeleton in the open blown on by the winds of heaven: O’er his white banes, when they are bare, The wind sall blaw for evermair. But Virtue is pictured as a person and not as a skeleton; so we have to correct and, when we do so, we do not get an immediate and undoubted image. We may first think of a thin haggard face with prominent cheek-bones and jaw; but such faces look bleak whether exposed to the cold air or not: there is little propriety in the thought. Finally, we may argue back from cold, that is naked, wisdom waiting on superfluous, that is overdressed, folly and conclude that Virtue is a naked wretch excluded from a firm place in society while Vices are received. But even so the picture hardly exists: the imagination is hardly stirred; and we must conclude that the author’s imagination too was not properly kindled. The second passage is spoken by Helena after Bertram, unknowing, has begotten his child on her:


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But O strange men, That can such sweet use make of what they hate, When saucy trusting of the cozen’d thoughts Defiles the pitchy night: so lust doth play With what it loathes for that which is away. (IV. 4. 21–5) This, roughly, means: how strange men are in being able to get such pleasure from and give such pleasure to the person they hate, when a proneness, bred of wanton thoughts, to be deluded more than matches in its moral darkness the actual darkness of night. So it happens that lust enjoys the object of its hate in place of the absent object of its desire. The first line and a half are perfect, simple in expression yet striking in effect, conveying much in little. But the next line and a half are obscure and clotted, yielding their sense to the intellect rather than to the imagination, creating no lively image; they are strange, but barrenly so. The defects show up at once when set beside the lines of Measure for Measure which, dealing with the same subject, Claudio’s intercourse with Juliet, and using the same words, saucy and sweet, cannot be independent of the present passage. Here Angelo, commenting on this intercourse, says Ha, fie, these filthy vices! It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image In stamps that are forbid. (II. 4. 42–6) Here all is brilliantly clear and pointed, and the imagery can be dwelt on with advantage. Murder is a theft from nature and is likened to the theft of gold: than such theft forging illicit coin is no better. But begetting an illegitimate child is just such forgery; hence no better than murder. Helena’s words indeed “defile the pitchy night” in comparison with this clarity. This failure of the poetic imagination in these two passages typifies a general failure throughout the play. The construction is, as already noted, masterly and so is the way the characters are outlined; and these ensure great interest for the play: but the execution, lacking the supreme imaginative warmth, fails to bring these great virtues to fruition. We shall never know the reason for this failure, which may well have been nothing more complicated than an attack of the toothache at the critical time of creation; but it may help a little to point out that Shakespeare had, in the plot he chose and in the treatment he proposed to give it, set himself a task of great difficulty.


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One of Shakespeare’s recurrent problems as a comedy writer was how to combine the romantic and improbable and fantastic plots he usually chose with a vitality and a realism of characterisation which his own inclinations insisted on. He had more than one solution. For instance, in Much Ado he puts his realism into the sub-plots: the persons in the so-called main plot, Claudio, Hero, Don John, are so little characterised that they pass well enough in their improbable setting. In the Merchant of Venice the most realistic and highly developed character is Shylock and he threatens through his overdevelopment to upset the fairy-tale world to which in his original capacity of Big Bad Man he was appropriate. Shakespeare maintains the harmony, or rather creates a richer one, by bringing out the Jewish character of the real world Shylock inhabits: for Jewish meant strange and alien; and this strangeness is the connecting link with the different strangeness of the world of the fairy-tale. In All’s Well, as W. W. Lawrence has brought out so admirably, the main material is from folk-lore. It comprises two different but immemorial folk themes: the healing of a king leading to marriage and the fulfilment of certain seemingly impossible tasks. Shakespeare in choosing such material and then in making the main characters concerned, the French King, Bertram, and Helena, highly realistic set himself a problem of the first difficulty, far harder than those in the Merchant of Venice and Much Ado, only to be solved by the application of his highest powers. Consider these three characters for a moment. Of these the French King is the most sketchily drawn, yet set him beside some of the other royal persons in mature Shakespearean comedy and see the result. Orsino is lover rather than ruler and is hardly comparable. But take Don Pedro from Much Ado and the two Dukes in As You Like It, consider what flat figures these are, and then notice the relative realism of the French King, with his tiredness, his strong sense of duty, his warm-hearted loyalty to his newly dead friend, Bertram’s father, his distrust of the steadiness of the younger generation, and his noble yet pathetic anxiety not to outlast his usefulness. “Would I were with him!” is his comment to Bertram on his dead father: Would I were with him! He would always say— Methinks I hear him now—his plausive words He scatter’d not in ears but grafted them To grow there and to bear: ‘Let me not live’— This his good melancholy oft began On the catastrophe and heel of pastime When it was out—‘Let me not live’, quoth he, ‘After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses All but new things disdain, whose judgments are Mere fathers of their garments, whose constancies Expire before their fashions.’ This he wish’d.


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I, after him, do after him wish too, Since I nor wax nor honey can bring home, I quickly were dissolved from my hive To give some labourers room. (I. 2. 52–67) There you have living characterisation, recalling the portrayal of Henry IV more than that of the comedy princes. Bertram, again, is a far more detailed study than the Claudios and Antonios and Orlandos of the genuine comedies; a character drawn from a close and not very friendly study of spoilt and unlicked aristocracy. Helena, too, is far closer to actual life than the heroine, psychologically untroubled, charming and witty, usual in the comedies, and reminds one rather of the troubled psyche of Euripides’s Electra. Now Shakespeare was really interested in such characterisation when he wrote All’s Well; and we know it because the play’s freest poetry goes to establish it—witness the French King’s speech just quoted. All the greater therefore was his difficulty in dealing with folk-lore material where psychological subtlety is least to the point. It is interesting to compare Shakespeare with his original and to see how Boccaccio coped with his inherited fairy-tale material. Boccaccio’s problem was similar: he had to tame the fabulous into the realistic and the sophisticated. But he set himself a less exacting standard of realism: all he aimed at was a diverting story that would not overtax the powers of a lively and critical audience to suspend willingly their disbelief. So he contented himself with keeping the characters simple, with inserting a few realistic touches like Helena’s efficient management of Bertram’s estate while he is in Italy, and with taking the fabulous lightly. Above all he has that supreme confidence of the great artist really in control of his material enabling him to tell his story, fabulous though it may be, in a simple and compelling way that leaves the reader no option but unqualified acceptance. He allows his reader no more doubt than Dostoevski when he describes the monastery at the beginning of the Brothers Karamazov. All this is remote from Shakespeare both as regards the task set and the way it is carried out. Such then are some of the ways in which Shakespeare failed as a whole and incidentally some of the ways in which he scored partial successes. Before passing to what Shakespeare did achieve I must speak of some of the subsidiary problems that confront any critic of the play. Some of these problems have been thoroughly disposed of by W. W. Lawrence. For instance, he makes it clear that, by the rules of the game Shakespeare was playing, our sympathies are meant to be with Helena. Such a contention is important, and it warns us to be careful of sympathising overmuch with Bertram in what appears to a modern a wickedly cruel situation. By modern standards the King acts very hardly to Bertram in forcing Helena upon him. We are too apt to explain this hardness as something forced on the King by his oath. Doubtless


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some such motive is required but not to the extent usually thought necessary. For, by Elizabethan standards, the King is less hard than by ours. Bertram was his ward, and at his disposal. Helena was beautiful and intelligent, a fit bride for any young nobleman apart from her birth. And when the King says, ’Tis only title thou disdain’st in her, the which I can build up, an Elizabethan audience would have accepted the plea and have considered Bertram to have had as fair a deal as the way of the world made usual. Another problem that Lawrence seeks to settle is the modern resentment at the theme of the substitute bride, or the bed-trick, as it is sometimes called. He argues that this was a traditional motive, familiar to the audience, a piece of fairy-lore that could be accepted without question. Here, however, I doubt if the matter can be settled so simply. The popular opinion against the bed-trick here and in Measure for Measure has been too strong to be disregarded or explained away. It is a safe rule that you should always respect popular opinion or apparent prejudice and always suspect the reasons alleged for it. And, as a preliminary, it may be useful to ask why popular opinion has objected to the bed-trick and not objected to something in itself equally disgusting in Twelfth Night, namely Olivia’s accepting Sebastian as a substitute lover for Cesario. The idea that Viola and Sebastian had interchangeable souls is a monstrous insult to human nature. Yet it is a convention which in the play popular opinion has had no difficulty in accepting. The conclusion seems to be that convention by itself is not enough to secure acceptance: the context has to be taken into account. Now in Measure for Measure the context is of that seriousness that the fairy-lore of the bed-trick is somehow shocking, and popular opinion has rightly been hostile. On the other hand this hostility has been wrongly extended to the same incident in All’s Well. For all the realism of the characters, the moral earnestness of All’s Well never approaches that of Measure for Measure. We remain in a moral climate where incidents may happen unquestioned and where convention can evade scrutiny. We are vaguely on Helena’s side and we wish her well in her intrinsically dubious adventure. Yet another problem concerns certain passages which some critics have found strange or unworthy of Shakespeare and which they have explained as being either not Shakespeare at all or relics of much earlier work.2 There are many such passages and I deal only with the longer. The first is the talk between Helena and Parolles near the opening of the play (I. 1. 117) on virginity. It is in part both feeble and indecent, and critics have sought to relieve Shakespeare of it and give it to a collaborator or interpolator. But is there any proof? The episode is not mere accretion. Parolles is an important character, at once the corrupter of Bertram and the excuse for his ill practices; and we need to make his acquaintance early


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in the play. Part of the feeble volubility of the wit may be dramatic: Parolles must be voluble to live up to his name. And as for the actual writing being unworthy of Shakespeare, he had written this kind of rhetoric, for set rhetoric it is, more than once before. Take first some of the sentences on virginity: Parolles. There’s little that can be said in’t, ’tis against the rule of nature. To speak on the part of virginity is to accuse your mothers, which is most infallible disobedience. He that hangs himself is a virgin: virginity murders itself and should be buried in highways out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate offendress against nature. Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese; consumes itself to the very paring and so dies with feeding his own stomach. Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the canon. Keep it not: you cannot choose but lose by it; out with it. Parolles does not speak so well on virginity as Falstaff does on honour, but their words belong to the same author. Or take the following passage on conscience: I’ll not meedle with it: it is a dangerous thing. It makes a man a coward: a man cannot steal but it accuseth him; he cannot swear but it checks him; he cannot lie with his neighbour’s wife but it detects him. ’Tis a blushing shamefast spirit that mutinies in a man’s bosom; it fills one full of obstacles: it made me once restore a purse of gold that I found; it beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of all towns and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live well endeavours to trust to himself and to live without it. This is Clarence’s Second Murderer in Richard III speaking and he treats conscience just as Parolles treats virginity, enumerating the different crimes the quality is guilty of and referring to scripture through the Ten Commandments where Parolles does so through parodying St. Paul on charity. Since Shakespeare had written already at least twice in this vein, why seek to deprive him of a third manifestation? And as to the ineptitude of Helena joining in the talk, that is prepared for by her comment on Parolles as he enters to the effect that she knows him to be a liar, a fool, and a coward but that she loves him because he is Bertram’s companion. Parolles, speaking in the vicarious glamour of Bertram, can be tolerated, however nasty or windy his talk. Then there are the couplets; and it is true that these are many and that some occur in places where they are least expected in Shakespeare’s mature work. The most conspicuous places are in the second act. In II. 1. 133, when Helena makes her final and successful attempt to persuade the King to try her remedy, blank verse gives place to couplets; and in II. 3. 78 Helena, having spoken mature


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and lovely blank verse before making her actual choice of a husband, falls into the stiffness and ceremony of rhyme. This use of rhyme at the high moments of action is indeed extraordinary. But it is not unparalleled in Shakespeare, for exactly the same thing happens in the First Part of Henry VI where Talbot and his son perish in couplets. But though the parallel may argue for the authenticity of the couplets in All’s Well, the question remains why he chose to use them in such places. In my answer to it the matter of “stratification” may come up at the same time, but it is in itself subsidiary; for if Shakespeare chose to use chunks of earlier work these must be considered no less organic to his scheme than the actual insects or postage stamps or leaves gummed on to the canvas of a surrealist picture. In the conversation between Helena and the King it is the King who gives the cue with (line 133), Thou thought’st to help me; and such thanks I give As one near death to those that wish him live. But Helena takes up the cue and has most of the talk to the end of the scene. What is most evident in her first speeches is their piety and their suggestion of a miracle: He that of greatest works is finisher Oft does them by the weakest minister. So holy writ in babes hath judgement shown, When judges have been babes; great floods have flown From simple sources and great seas have dried, When miracles have by the greatest been denied. The “baby judges” could be Daniel judging Susanna, or the wise “babes and sucklings” of the Gospels. The “flood” is the water struck from the rock by Moses at Horeb and Kadesh; the sea is the Red Sea as described in Exodus. In her second speech Helena continues in the same strain in answer to the King’s doubts: Inspired merit so by breath is barr’d. It is not so with Him that all things knows As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows. But most it is presumption in us when The help of heaven we count the act of men. Dear sir, to my endeavours give consent; Of heaven, not me, make an experiment.


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Here again there is scriptural reference, in the first line; a general reference to Hebrew kings who denied the truth of the inspired prophets. This accumulation of scriptural reference, this calling in the help of God, and this confidence in a forthcoming miracle combine to give a special character to this portion of the scene. Shakespeare may have got his hint from his original, which runs “The King, hearing these words, said to himself: ‘This woman peradventure is sent unto me of God’.” But, whether or not, he surely must have used the pomp and stiffness of rhyme as appropriate to a solemn and hieratic content. The hieratic tone is continued in Helena’s next speech, a speech habitually quoted as obviously early work and as strong evidence for stratification. To the King’s question of how long the cure will take Helena replies The great’st grace lending grace, Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring, Ere twice in murk and occidental damp Moist Hesperus hath quench’d his sleepy lamp, Or four and twenty times the pilot’s glass Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass, What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly, Health shall live free and sickness freely die. Now though it is very queer that Shakespeare should write so tall at so crucial a place in the play, it is pretty plain what he is doing. He is deliberately evading drama and substituting ritual and cloudy incantation. And it makes matters more rather than less queer to postulate just here a theft from an old play or the calling in of a bad poet to do an inferior job of work. The resemblance of these lines to the beginning of the Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet has sometimes been noticed; and to some this resemblance indicates a collaborator still more strongly. To me it suggests that Shakespeare had at his call a rather clumsy and heightened style in rhyme which he used from time to time to mark certain passages in his plays violently off from the rest. Some such style was plainly needed for a play within a play: the need for its use in the scene under discussion is far from obvious, but, that need granted, the style itself should not cause us undue surprise or necessitate unusual explanations. I maintain therefore that you need not invoke stratification or collaborators to help explain the play: first because they cannot explain the really puzzling things and secondly because what they can explain admits of other explanations. It is, on the other hand, impossible to disprove stratification or collaboration; and if I now dismiss the notion of them it is for reasons of probability not of verifiable truth.


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I revert now to what I have principally noted of the play: Shakespeare’s failure to kindle his imagination at the high places of the action. I have pointed out the difficulty, exceptional in his comedies, in which he involved himself: that of fitting a highly realistic set of principal actors into a plot belonging to the fantastic world of fairy-lore. And it is quite possible that this difficulty explains the imaginative failure: that Shakespeare, knowing when he came to actual composition that he could not succeed, evaded the attempt and resorted, when the crises came, to the conventional, the sententious, or the hieratic, never taxing his full imaginative powers. The very consistency makes this apparent evasion the more likely. There is no weight of evidence that Shakespeare changed his mind during composition. There is indeed one place where action and high poetry are combined: Helena’s soliloquy after she has heard Bertram’s refusal to return to France while his wife is there. She blames herself for the dangers he now undergoes in the Florentine wars and resolves to quit the country so that he may return: O you leaden messengers, That ride upon the violent speed of fire, Fly with false aim, move the still-piecing air, That sings with piercing; do not touch my lord. Whoever shoots at him, I set him there; Whoever charges on his forward breast, I am the caitiff that do hold him to’t. And though I kill him not I am the cause His death was so effected. Better ’twere I met the ravin lion when he roar’d With sharp constraint of hunger; better ’twere That all the miseries which nature owes Were mine at once. No, come thou home, Rossillion, Whence honour but of danger wins a scar As oft it loses all. I will be gone: My being here it is that holds thee hence. Shall I stay here to do’t? No, no, although The air of paradise did fan the house And angels offic’d all. It is futile to ask why Shakespeare’s imagination was here, uniquely, kindled. The present point is that such kindling is unique, that the high places of the action before and after fail to evoke high poetry, and that such failure remains the consistent rule. It looks as if Shakespeare, however ill-satisfied with what he was doing, at least knew it from the start and stuck to it. Not that he stuck to the same method of writing below his stylistic height at the high places. As noted already, he makes Helena speak heavy and involved


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couplets when at the end of the play’s first scene she makes her great resolve to try her fortune in Paris, he makes Helena and the King speak strange and hieratic couplets when she persuades him to try her cure, and he makes Helena drop into couplets when she chooses her husband. Between this last scene (II. 3) and the scene (IV. 3) containing many nocturnal happenings and critical for Bertram there is no long emphatic scene. The intervening happenings are parcelled out into short scenes; action is competently described in a middle style, mature but in point of poetry not distinguished though better than the sententious or hieratic couplets. But the effect is to dissipate, to make the temperature of action warm not hot. Such dissipation was wise, for the critical scene which crowns the action (IV. 3) is nearly all in prose. It is in itself admirable, but its prose provides yet one more example of the means of depressing high action. The unmasking of Parolles could, of course, in any kind of treatment be only in prose, but the preliminary moral comments of the two French Lords on Bertram and Bertram’s own mental crises could have lent themselves to high poetical treatment. The last scene of the play, when the whole truth comes out, again offered excellent chances of poetry. Shakespeare refuses or evades them, not (on the whole) by sententious couplet writing, nor by using prose instead of verse, but by sheer ingenuity and complication of plot. In Shakespeare’s original, Giletta, having fulfilled her tasks, confronts Beltramo, who has returned home, on a feast day and makes good her claims simply and directly. Shakespeare could have imitated this simplicity, but he vastly complicates the action by the business of the rings and by making Diana and her mother travel to France. There is so much business and so many surprises that there is little room for the deeper feelings and hence no call for high poetry. So far I have spoken mainly of what the play fails in and of how possibly it comes to do so. I pass on now to some of its positive qualities. Though we need not impute bitterness or cynicism to the general complexion of the play, we cannot but find it full of suffering. And the sense of suffering is heightened because there are hints of an earlier prosperity which the final reconciliation of Bertram and Helena does not promise to equal. The earlier prosperity is detected through the aged characters. The Countess resembles the old lady on whom William Empson wrote one of his best poems. She is “ripe”, full of experience and with wide and generous sympathies; but she is also a “cooling planet” and the crops she reaps though in her sole control are scanty. Her husband had been a splendid person, and Rossillion in his day must have had other and gayer representatives than his “unbaked and doughy” son, his tautnerved physician’s daughter, and the “shrewd and unhappy fool” whom his widow keeps in her service out of kindness and respect for her husband’s memory. The French King had evidently been all that a king should be, but now he “nor wax nor honey can bring home”. And even after Helena has cured him he regains no joy in life. He conducts his examination of Bertram in the last act efficiently


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enough, but his chief vitality goes to fostering his (very natural) suspicions that Bertram has murdered Helena: My fore-past proofs, howe’er the matter fall, Shall tax my fears of little vanity, Having vainly fear’d too little. . . . I am wrapp’d in dismal thinkings. And even in the efficient exercise of his duties is insinuated the fact of his age: Let’s take the instant by the forward top; For we are old, and on our quick’st decrees The inaudible and noiseless foot of time Steals, ere we can effect them. Lafeu indeed has plenty of vitality, as when he calls his desponding master “my royal fox” and asks him if he will eat no grapes and when he detects the fraud of Parolles. Yet we know all the time he is old: Iam senior, sed cruda viro viridisque senectus. In front of these memories or relics of past happiness and vigour are set the hungry and unsatisfied or dour representatives of the present generation: the boorish and unlicked aristocrat Bertram, the Clown who hates being one, the two adventurers, one good the other contemptible, Helena and Parolles, Diana, correct but uneasy through poverty and a widowed mother, and the two French Lords faintly drawn perhaps but correct rather than gay, and severely orthodox and even theological in their talk. The whole presentation is wonderfully interesting, and the closeness to actual life of some of the characters is remarkable. Yet the world these characters inhabit is cold and forbidding. We get no feeling, as we do in Hamlet, of varied life being transacted along with the happenings proper to the play itself. The sense of incompleteness noticed in the poetry of two short passages hangs over the whole play. The imagination has not done its full work. The artistic process has somehow halted before completion. Of all poets Shakespeare is least prone to violate the drama by speaking in his own person. Yet here there is the suspicion that his personal feelings, unobjectified and untransmuted, have slipped illegitimately into places which his poetic imagination, not fully kindled, has not succeeded in reaching. The evident dislike of the younger generation, for instance, has got a slight touch of the personal in it, as if, at that time, Shakespeare did actually compare it, to its disadvantage, with a more settled and more gracious age, now expiring and ineffective.


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For the pious and theological tone, the conversation between the French King and Helena, when she persuades him to try her cure, has already been cited. It is of heaven, not of Helena, that the King makes experiment; and his cure is miraculous, not only as proclaimed by Helena, but, when effected, as reported by Lafeu: They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. . . . A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor. . . . The very hand of heaven. Nor does the conception of Helena as a person specially favoured by heaven cease with her curing the King. The Countess, hearing Bertram has cast her away, says What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive, Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice. Nor does Shakespeare let the theme of Helena’s divine agency drop. In IV. 4. she says to Diana’s mother Doubt not but heaven Hath brought me up to be your daughter’s dower, As it hath fated her to be my motive And helper to a husband. But the most explicitly theological place in the play is the beginning of the culminating scene, IV. 3, where the two French Lords comment on Bertram’s conduct. Not only the position but the speakers make this comment important. The two French Lords are the choric characters, the punctum indiferens of the play, and what they say gives a standard to which the play itself can be referred. After the First Lord has recounted, with strong disapproval, Bertram’s seduction of Diana, these words follow:3 Second Lord. Now God lay our rebellion! As we are ourselves, what things are we. First Lord. Merely our own traitors. And as in the common course of all treasons, we still see them reveal themselves, till they attain to their abhorred ends; so he that in this action contrives against his own nobility in his proper stream o’erflows himself.


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Second Lord. Is it not meant damnable in us to be trumpeters of our unlawful intents? There are two doctrines here: first and most emphatic, the theological doctrine of man’s depravity unaided by divine grace, second, the doctrine that great crime will out, and often by the criminal giving himself away, to his ultimate punishment. Bertram, in his acts, has shown himself to be man cut off from grace, and by his indiscreet confidences, his “o’erflowing himself ”, has prepared his own detection and punishment. It looks, therefore, as if Shakespeare not only made Helena and Bertram highly realistic figures but made them represent heavenly grace and natural, unredeemed, man respectively. In fact, he had in his mind, possibly, the Spenserian practice of multiple meanings with so obvious an analogy as Britomart, who is at once a realistic character, a fiercely monogamous and jealous woman, and an allegorical representation of chastity; and, more likely, the Morality Play. And as in Henry IV there has been detected the Morality theme of man or the prince fought over by the virtues and vices (represented by Prince Hal, the Lord Chief Justice, and Falstaff ); so here there are signs (not very emphatic) of the same theme. Bertram, as natural man, corresponds to Hal, the Prince; Helena corresponds to Honour and Justice as represented by the Lord Chief Justice; and Parolles, as often noted, corresponds to Falstaff. But I am far from wanting to press these correspondences; and it is nearer the truth to say that a second version of the Morality theme can be detected in All’s Well than that Bertram copies Hal and Parolles Falstaff. Alexander4 has rightly warned us not to press Johnson’s remark that “Parolles has many of the lineaments of Falstaff ” too far, and rightly insists that “Falstaff for all his vices belongs to another order of character”. Further, the Morality role of the tempter protrudes more obviously from the slight character of Parolles than from Falstaff ’s massiveness. In the same way Prince Hal, with his strong intellect, his wide knowledge of men, his irony, and his fundamental sense of duty, is remote from the unsophisticated and boorish Bertram. Moreover the relations between Prince Hal and Falstaff on the one hand and Bertram and Parolles on the other are totally different. Prince Hal knows what he is doing and has summed up Falstaff; it is Falstaff who is self-deceived about his influence on the Prince. Bertram is the simple dupe of Parolles’s pretensions. To detect the Morality motive in All’s Well may be to add a new fact to the nature of the play; it does little to explain its character, for it is not strong enough to make itself powerfully felt. If Shakespeare had made the Morality motive very obvious and at the same time furnished it with his highly realistic characters, he might have done for Elizabethan drama what Euripides did for the Greek. This is not to say that Shakespeare copied the Morality perversely and without reason. In his last plays he was largely concerned with adjusting symbolism and real life; and only in the Winter’s Tale and the Tempest did he succeed. It is perfectly


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natural that he should have made analogous experiments earlier in his career. Such an experiment I believe we have in All’s Well. I come now finally to the characters; and it is in the delineation of the main characters joined with the solid merit of the plot that the play’s virtue most consists. Of the three main characters—and they correspond to the Morality motive— least need be said about Parolles. Ever since Charles I substituted Parolles for All’s Well as the play’s title in his copy of the Second Folio, readers have recognised Parolles as a successful comic figure. He is a small impostor, but he puts up a tolerable show. His sermon on virginity to Helena is genuinely voluble; and he has a genuine if limited talent in imitating the language of his social superiors and claiming a knowledge of their manners. This talent comes out in the excellent comic passage (II. 1. 24–61) where Bertram laments to the two Lords and Parolles that he has been forbidden the wars: Noble heroes, my sword and yours are kin. Good sparks and lustrous, a word, good metals. You shall find in the regiment of the Spinii one Captain Spurio with his cicatrice, an emblem of war, here on his sinister cheek. It was this very sword entrenched it. And when the Lords have gone and Bertram has been unable in the courtesy of farewell to squeeze out more than the ridiculous “ I grow to you, and our parting is a tortured body”, Parolles shows some talent in his confirming his hold on Bertram with Use a more spacious ceremony to the noble lords. You have restrained yourself within the list of too cold an adieu. Be more expressive to them; for they wear themselves in the cap of the time, there do muster true gait, eat speak and move under the influence of the most received star: and, though the devil lead the measure, such are to be followed. After them, and take a more dilated farewell. That is quite good imitation of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stuff; and it is not surprising that it needed the superior penetration of Lafeu to detect the fraud. Critics have been too apt to exalt Helena at the expense of the other characters. She is no more interesting or instructive than Bertram; and the measure of neither character can be taken apart from the other. Nor is Van Doren right in saying that they both “thin into a mere figure of fable as the plot wears on”. We learn indeed little new about Helena after she has put on her pilgrim’s habit, but the crises through which Bertram passes in the last half of the play at once form the gist of the plot and reveal his nature. But though I disagree with Van Doren in this and in his centring all the “blazing brightness of the play”


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in her, he has succeeded better than other critics in defining her character. Here are some of his remarks: One of her favourite words is ‘nature’, and there is much of it in her. She has body as well as mind, and can jest grossly with Parolles. . . . There is nothing frail about Helena, whose passion is secret but unmeasured. And because her body is real her mind is gifted with a rank, a sometimes masculine fertility. It is easy for her to achieve the intellectual distinction of, ‘In his bright radiance and collateral light’ just as it is natural that she should dress her longing for Bertram in the tough language of physics and metaphysics. . . . She has in her own dark way the force of Imogen, though she inhabits an inferior play.5 Van Doren is right. There is a formidable tautness in Helena’s passion, which allies her with Spenser’s Britomart, who, riding to rescue her lover Artegal from the Amazon Radegund, looked right down to hide the fellness of her heart, or to Susan, the fiercely monogamous woman in Virginia’s Woolf ’s The Waves, who says that her love is fell. Rosalind and Viola are indeed in love but not with the strained passion of Helena. They say nothing to match, for instance, those lines she speaks, just before her open avowal of love, in answer to the Countess’s protest “I say, I am your mother”: Pardon, madam; The Count Rossillion cannot be my brother. I am from humble, he from honour’d name; No note upon my parents, his all noble. My master, my dear lord he is; and I His servant live, and will his vassal die. He must not be my brother— nor her words just before she chooses Bertram as her husband from the King’s wards: The blushes in my cheeks thus whisper me, ‘We blush that thou shouldst choose; but, be refused, Let the white death sit on thy cheek for ever; We’ll ne’er come there again.’ Not that Shakespeare makes her a mere humour of predatory monogamy. Twice her nerve fails her momentarily: first, when, like Isabella pleading with


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Angelo, she accepts the French King’s first rebuff and nearly gives up; and second, when, having chosen and finding Bertram unwilling, she begs the King not to force the wedding. Such touches make us remember the terrible ordeal Helena had set herself: not to have quailed would argue her less or more than human. A further natural touch is her self-knowledge. Her strong intelligence does not spare her own self; as when she admits to the Countess that her resolve to cure the French King was not disinterested and that she would not have thought of it but for Bertram’s journey to Paris. Nor has she the least illusion about Bertram’s disposition. The irony and the truth of Helena’s situation are that with so much intelligence and so firm a mind she can be possessed by so enslaving a passion for an unformed, rather stupid, morally timid, and very self-centred youth: for by the standards of real life there is nothing surprising in Helena’s having fallen for Bertram’s handsome outside, his high rank, and her unconscious knowledge that she could dominate him and give him moral backbone, granted the chance. What is surprising is to see such truth of actual motivation, and one so little related to conventional motivation, figuring in an Elizabethan play. For Bertram himself we must remember that the fight was not between himself and Helena. Helena had powerful allies, while he had only Parolles. The play’s action is largely the story of how he yields to the pressure of numbers. But before pointing to that story, which as far as I know has not been clearly detected, I must substantiate some of the qualities I have given his character and indicate others. In that list of qualities I did not include “vicious”; and it is a triumph of art that Bertram can do so many selfish or mean things without incurring that epithet. Though never more than natural man, he is never, we feel, beyond the reach of grace. And that Shakespeare just then appeared to rate natural man decidedly low does not alter the fact. He keeps Bertram from positive viciousness by asserting from the first, and then reiterating, his crude immaturity. His mother, taking leave of Bertram in the first scene, hopes he will “succeed his father in manners as in shape”, and then adds “’Tis an unseason’d courtier”—which suggests that her hope is far from certainty. The French King, on first seeing Bertram, echoes the Countess’s parting words Youth, thou bear’st thy father’s face; Frank nature, rather curious than in haste, Hath well compos’d thee. Thy father’s moral parts Mayst thou inherit too! and goes on to praise Bertram’s father in detail and to dispraise the present generation of young men. Bertram’s father “looked into the service of the time”, that is had keen insight into military affairs, and “was discipled of the bravest”,


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in other words was glad to learn from his betters. Knowing that Bertram was under the discipline of Parolles, we can infer his shortcomings easily enough and the lubberly sense of guilt he must have felt when compared with his elders and betters. Thereafter (quite apart from the scanty and abrupt and sometimes boorish tone of Bertram’s speeches) the theme of his immaturity is maintained, for instance through Lafeu’s remark just before Helena chooses him for husband, “There’s one grape yet, I am sure thy father drank wine: but if thou be’st not an ass, I am a youth of fourteen; I have known thee already”, and through his later remark (beginning of IV. 5) including Bertram among the “unbaked and doughy youth of a nation”. There is something pathetic as well as disagreeable in Bertram’s gruff and inhibited bearing. Hardly ever has he the confidence to speak freely. He does so once when, in unguarded fury at the proposed marriage, he disputes the King’s command: King. Thou know’st she has rais’d me from my sickly bed. Ber. But follows it, my lord, to bring me down Must answer for your raising? I know her well: She had her breeding at my father’s charge. A poor physician’s daughter my wife! Disdain Rather corrupt me ever. That is emphatically spoken indeed; and we can see how on the field of battle, where the moral issues were elementary, Bertram would have shone. But his resistance is a mere unguarded flare-up, and he soon collapses. This moral cowardice joined to physical courage most characterises Bertram and explains his actions, making him not only mean and repellent but pathetic and to be pitied. It is in the last two acts that Shakespeare develops and illustrates this defect of Bertram, just as he had done Helena’s qualities in the earlier part of the play. Here he gives us, with brilliant insight into human nature, the processes by which Bertram quite gives way in the matters where he had most resisted. Part of that process takes place in IV. 3, the night-scene into which so much of the play’s action is crowded, and part in the last scene of all. At the beginning of IV. 3 Bertram has achieved the utmost self-assertion of which he was capable. He has defied his mother (and public opinion generally) in refusing to acknowledge his wife, he has defied the French King in stealing away from Paris to the wars, he has defied conventional morality by succeeding, as he thinks, in seducing Diana. Further he has risked being proved wrong by allowing Parolles to be tested, and he has violated his own sense of family loyalty by surrendering his ancestral ring to Diana. The scene itself, though largely occupied with the comic business of Parolles’s unmasking, mainly recounts the heavy series of blows to Bertram’s confidence in the various acts of defiance he has committed. First there is his mother’s letter: “there is something in’t that stings his nature; for on his reading it


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he changed almost into another man”. And it is not for nothing that these words come just before the pious words, quoted above, about the depravity of natural man. Bertram, though depraved, has still got a sensitive conscience. Next we hear of the French King’s high displeasure. Then we hear of Helena’s supposed death through grief (“the tenderness of her nature became as a prey to her grief; in fine, made a groan of her last breath and now she sings in heaven”); and in view of the effect the Countess’s letter had on Bertram we are expected to assume some remorse for this death. But this death has another consequence: his seduction of Diana has become serious, for he could now marry her. It has been a heavy series of blows, but for the moment he keeps control of himself and bluffs it all out with a brutal callousness and a bravado which we know conceal an inner qualm: I have to-night dispatched sixteen businesses, a month’s length a-piece, by an abstract of success. I have congied with the duke, done my adieu with his nearest; buried a wife, mourned for her; writ to my lady mother I am returning; entertained my convoy: and between these main parcels of dispatch effected many nicer needs. The last was the greatest, but that I have not ended yet. . . . The business is not ended, as fearing to hear of it hereafter. This last business was the supposed seduction of Diana; and his fear on that score is both the index of his habit of mind and the connecting link with the last scene of the play. There follows the unmasking of Parolles, which Bertram watches in sullen anger—not, like the others, with fun. As Parolles grows more explicit and imaginative in his lies, one of the French Lords says “He hath outvillained villainy so far, that the rarity redeems him”. To which Bertram replies angrily “A pox on him, he’s a cat still”. The events of the night leave Bertram thoroughly shaken. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his introduction to the New Cambridge edition of the play, sought to mitigate the unpleasantness of Bertram’s character, but could not extend the mitigation to his behaviour in the last scene. I do not think there is any discrepancy. Bertram’s nerve had been thoroughly undermined by the events just related; he was frightened of Diana. When confronted with her, his nerve gives way still more and he resorts in panic to any lie that will serve his turn. This exhibition of human nature is ignoble and unpleasant to witness, but it is perfectly true to the facts. Then, when the whole truth is out and Helena reappears, Bertram gives in completely. His former pursuer is now his saviour from a conspiracy of people and events which has overwhelmed him. And when to Helena’s lovely complaint that she is but the shadow of a wife, the name but not the thing, he replies “Both, both, O, pardon!”, there is not the least cause for doubting his sincerity. However true it may be that the Elizabethans would expect and accept such a revulsion of feeling, there is no need to invoke


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such expectations to justify a situation assumed to be incredible to a modern. Psychological truth and the conventions of the fairy-tale are here at one. And when Bertram goes on to say that he will love Helena “dearly, ever dearly”, we should believe him implicitly. Helena has got her man; and he needs her moral support with such pathetic obviousness that she never need fear his escape.

Notes on All ’s Well That Ends Well Helpful criticism of this play is scarce. The relevant sections of Van Doren’s and Alexander’s books have helped me most. I have mentioned Sir Arthur QuillerCouch’s good and sympathetic account of Bertram, but on many points I disagree with him completely. For instance (p. xxv), he considered Parolles an accretion: Apart from the business of the drum and his exposure as a poltroon, all Parolles does is to engage Helena early in chat which he intends to be bawdy. Parolles, though a light-weight as a character, is Bertram’s evil genius and essential to the balance of the play. E. E. Stoll has an interesting chapter (xiii) on All’s Well and Measure for Measure in his From Shakespeare to Joyce (New York 1944). I go a good way with him, but disagree too on many points. NOTES 1. E. M. W. Tillyard, Poetry Direct and Oblique (revised edition, London 1945) pp. 75–6. 2. For more detailed treatment of supposed “stratification” in All’s Well see Appendix E, p. 151. 3. I adopt Dover Wilson’s assignment of the speeches to the two Lords and his emendation of lay for delay at the beginning. 4. Op. cit., pp. 192–3. 5. Op. cit., pp. 215–16.

QQQ 1958—George Wilson Knight. From The Sovereign Flower G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985) was a prolific critic whose many works on Shakespeare include The Wheel of Fire, a collection of essays on the tragedies, and The Crown of Life, a sustained reflection on Shakespeare’s last plays. The following selection is taken from an essay titled “The Third Eye” published in The Sovereign Flower. Knight’s central argument is that an understanding of this difficult play can be found in clarifying the roles of the two principal characters. Specifically, the resolution of


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the play is to be understood as a “salvation,” as Bertram being saved by Helena. To do this, Bertram’s faults must be illuminated and a new understanding of Helena as a spiritual, almost otherworldly creation established. Here, then, the central episode of the play is Helena’s curing of the King, a moment that presents her as a “medium” figure in the Christian tradition. The selection begins with a segment discussing Bertram and then proceeds to a prolonged consideration of Helena.

Such is the philosophic atmosphere within which the story of Helena and Bertram is played out. Our sympathies are throughout directed towards Helena, and, if we are to make sense of the play we must see where and why Bertram is at fault in rejecting her. We shall now consider his behaviour. He is conceived as a normal young man of good birth, but showing lack of judgement and an inadequate scale of values. He has the failings of pride and of licentiousness. But he exists in a society where a man does not lose his honour by sexual laxity, as does a woman. He does lose it if, like Parolles, he is proved a coward, but Bertram is no coward: far from it. Like the not dissimilar Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing, he is a fine soldier, and soldiership is a high male value. Certainly it seems hard not to sympathize with him just when the play itself appears to regard him as most grievously at fault: that is, when he rejects the advances of Helena, who has been given the right to choose whom she will as a husband in return for restoring the King’s health. Surely, we must insist, this is unfair; and if it be so, we cannot respond as we are meant to as we watch Helena tracking him down and finally victorious. We shall do our best to counter these admittedly serious objections. First, we must realize that in return for having cured the King Helena has asked for the right to choose a husband only from among those whose marriage is at the royal disposal (II. i. 197). The young lords paraded before her are at the King’s ‘bestowing’; he has over them ‘both sovereign power and father’s voice’ (II. iii. 59–60). We are in a society where the son would probably be in duty bound to obey a parent’s choice, and the King’s command holds yet greater cogency, the more so since his obligation to Helena, and therefore his own honour, is involved. Bertram is accordingly countering the behaviour expected of him. We must realize, too, that the play’s thought depicts a world where the sexual instincts of the male are almost automatic, and the female regularly on the defensive. Bertram should have had no difficulty in accepting any normally good-looking woman, provided that the marriage was honourable to him, and this marriage will be made so, as the King clearly asserts. Love in our sense would scarcely be an essential. Such a husband would have no inhibitions as to satisfying his romantic impulses elsewhere, and society would accept the solution, after the manner of Macduff ’s ‘We have willing dames enough’ (Macbeth, IV. iii. 73). The only sensible argument on Bertram’s side is offered much later, when


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he claims, in a passage to which we shall return, that his admiration for Lafeu’s daughter played its part; but he says nothing of this at the time, and it is clear that, unless there were some other all-powerful reason, he would automatically have accepted the girl on the King’s command. In such a society, that was no less than a plain duty. Why, then, does he reject Helena? Almost entirely, we are led to suppose, on grounds of birth. The issue is already clearly before us. Helena has known it all along: It were all one That I should love a bright particular star, And think to wed it, he is so above me: In his bright radiance and collateral light Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. The ambition in my love thus plagues itself: The hind that would be mated by the lion Must die for love. (I. i. 97) Her ‘baser stars’ shut her up in a world of ‘wishes’ (I. i. 199); she is ‘from humble, he from honour’d name’; he is her ‘master’ and ‘dear lord’ (I. iii. 164–6). But Fortune is no just goddess to ‘put such difference’ between their ‘two estates’ when they are level in ‘qualities’ (I. iii. 118). It is felt as unfair, and we must assume that her chances would otherwise have been good. Even after Bertram is forced to marry her she knows that her ‘homely stars’ do not really balance her ‘great fortune’ (II. v. 81). And yet we are not to suppose that such a view is just. The Countess recognizes in Helena a supreme worth, and is furious at her son’s behaviour: There’s nothing here that is too good for him But only she; and she deserves a lord That twenty such rude boys might tend upon And call her hourly mistress. (III. ii. 82) That is what we are directed to believe. Let us glance at the rejection. Helena, as the King’s saviour, has proved herself unique, and chooses Bertram as her reward. The dialogue goes: King Why, then, young Bertram, take her; she’s thy wife. Bertram My wife, my liege! I shall beseech your Highness In such a matter give me leave to use


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The help of mine own eyes. King Know’st thou not, Bertram, What she has done for me? Bertram Yes, my good lord; But never hope to know why I should marry her. King Thou know’st she has raised me from my sickly bed. Bertram But follows it, my lord, to bring me down Must answer for your raising? I know her well: She had her breeding at my father’s charge. A poor physician’s daughter my wife! Disdain Rather corrupt me ever! King ’Tis only title thou disdain’st in her, the which I can build up. (II. iii. 112) Bertram’s dislike of such a marriage is, in its social context, understandable, but his manner of address is ugly. It is unworthy of his father, whom the King has earlier praised for his utter lack of ‘contempt’ or ‘bitterness’, and for treating those ‘who were below him’ as creatures ‘of another place’; that is, as his equals (I. ii. 36, 41). So now the King, pursuing his earlier thought, delivers a sermon of considerable importance: ’Tis only title thou disdain’st in her, the which I can build up. Strange is it, that our bloods, Of colour, weight, and heat, pour’d all together, Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off In differences so mighty. If she be All that is virtuous, save what thou dislikest, A poor physician’s daughter, thou dislikest Of virtue for the name: but do not so: From lowest place when virtuous things proceed, The place is dignified by the doer’s deed: When great additions swell’s, and virtue none, It is a dropsied honour. Good alone Is good without a name. Vileness is so: The property by what it is should go, Not by the title. She is young, wise, fair; In these to nature she’s immediate heir, And these breed honour. That is honour’s scorn, Which challenges itself as honour’s born, And is not like the sire: honours thrive When rather from our acts we them derive


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Than our foregoers. The mere word’s a slave Debosh’d on every tomb, on every grave A lying trophy; and as oft is dumb Where dust and damn’d oblivion is the tomb Of honour’d bones indeed. What should be said? If thou cans’t like this creature as a maid, I can create the rest: virtue and she Is her own dower; honour and wealth from me. (II. iii. 124) Bertram still refuses. The King insists, calling him a ‘proud, scornful boy’, guilty of ‘vile misprision’; that is, misvaluation. He is told to check his ‘contempt’ and ‘disdain’; it is for his own ‘good’ (II. iii. 158–66). It is emphasized that his sin is an error in valuation, and also a sin against himself. Bowing to the King’s power, Bertram gives way, but directly after the marriage leaves for the wars. Bertram’s own mother, the Countess, takes, as we have seen, precisely the same view of his behaviour as does the King, saying, when she hears of it: ‘This is not well, rash and unbridled boy’; such as he are no better than ‘rude’—i.e. untaught, undisciplined—‘boys’ (III. ii. 30, 84). That on the one side. On the other we have Bertram’s hurried escape from ‘the dark house and the detested wife’ (II. iii. 309), and his telling words, on seeing Helena’s approach, ‘Here comes my clog’ (II. v. 59). When he tells Diana ‘I was compelled to her’ (IV. ii. 15), he speaks the truth. We cannot altogether stifle our sympathies, and must even be prepared to recognize a possible undercurrent of satire against such conventional and arbitrary marriages. It is, in part, such marriages which encourage sexual licence, and we are shortly to watch Bertram so engaging himself. What we can say is that, though no one could blame him for not loving Helena, and though we cannot wholly blame him for acting as he does if he really cannot even like her, we can, and are meant to, realize that he can indeed be blamed for positively disliking her: his values, mainly based on matters of rank, are all wrong. Meanwhile, we are invited to feel that not only has his too superficial understanding of honour plunged him into a great sin, but that only Helena can save him. The Countess speaks: What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom Heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice. (III. iv. 25)


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In scorning Helena he has all but scorned divinity; but she, in her turn, may be his saviour. In leaving for the wars, Bertram aspires to a high male value, and can be to that extent applauded. The King has already recalled the time when he and Bertram’s father ‘first tried our soldiership’ (I. ii. 26), continuing: He did look far Into the service of the time, and was Discipled of the bravest. (I. ii. 26) It is to be expected that Bertram will prove true to his father’s memory, and as a soldier he does so, however far beneath him he falls in social understanding. Before Helena’s choice of him, he had wanted to leave female charms and all the dalliance of court life for the battle-field: Bertram I shall stay here the forehorse to a smock, Creaking my shoes on the plain masonry, Till honour be bought up, and no sword worn But one to dance with! By heaven, I’ll steal away. First Lord There’s honour in the theft. (II. i. 30) After Helena’s choice, he is determined: Go thou toward home; where I will never come, Whilst I can shake my sword, or hear the drum. Away, and for our flight! (II. v. 96) The lines are spoken in the mood of Hotspur’s ‘Come, let me taste my horse . . . ’ (I Henry IV, IV. i. 119). The poetry resounds with nobility and courage. His purpose is recognized as ‘noble’ (III, ii. 73). From now on war charges the atmosphere. There are war-sounds and warsights. Soldiers pass in fine show across the stage (III. v.). The drum captured by the enemy is important to the action (III. vi; IV. i). Sound-effects of drum and trumpet (as at III, iii) are important and should be amplified. We are in a world where ‘a scar nobly got, or a noble scar, is a good livery of honour’ (IV. v. 106). In such a world Bertram is thoroughly at home, and his values in good trim. As a soldier he knows himself, and is accordingly, as are most of us


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regarding our real abilities, capable of humility. The Duke of Florence gives him a high command: Duke The general of our horse thou art; and we, Great in our hope, lay our best love and credence Upon thy promising fortune. Bertram Sir, it is A charge too heavy for my strength; but yet We’ll strive to bear it for your worthy sake To the extreme edge of hazard. Duke Then go thou forth; And fortune play upon thy prosperous helm, As thy auspicious mistress! Bertram This very day, Great Mars, I put myself into thy file: Make me but like my thoughts, and I shall prove A lover of thy drum, hater of love. (III. iii. 1) The words ‘mistress’ and ‘lover’ again remind us of the intermingling of male and female valuations. Bertram is seen deliberately rejecting, not merely Helena, but all the so-called softness of feminine love. And he justifies the Duke’s confidence: his deeds of prowess are outstanding, his service called ‘honourable’ and ‘worthy’, people speak ‘nobly’ of him, and the King receives letters setting him ‘high in fame’ (III. v. 3–7, 48, 50; V. iii. 31). Were there no more to be said, were Bertram simply one who rejects love for military honour, there might be little complaint. But there is very much more to say. In rejecting love, he has not rejected sex, and in sexual matters is quite undisciplined; indeed, his sexual being is in chaos. Bertram and Parolles together exist as a centre to many easily recognized Shakespearian faults, including showiness and superficiality; and, though in matters of prowess Bertram himself is genuine, he remains in danger, once off the battlefield, of succumbing to a number of faulty valuations. His lack of discrimination is emphasized by his relationship to Parolles in whose courage and supposed experience he has complete faith. Parolles belongs to a well-known contemporary type of which Falstaff and Ben Jonson’s Bobadil are variants. He is less sympathetic than Falstaff, and more warmly conceived than Bobadil. We have seen that his attack on virginity holds wit and sense. He brilliantly creates for himself an aura of heroism: Noble heroes, my sword and yours are kin. Good sparks and lustrous, a word, good metals: you shall find in the regiment of the Spinii one


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Captain Spurio, with his cicatrice, an emblem of war, here on his sinister cheek; it was this very sword entrenched it. Say to him, I live; and observe his reports for me. (II. i. 40) His god is ‘Mars’ (II. i. 48). Besides being a braggart, he aspires to be a courtier. We have court satire from the Clown (in II. ii): it is one strand in the play’s labouring towards a distinction between true and false values, show and integrity. Parolles is wholly dedicated to the show, the outward appearance: he is off to the Court and means to ‘return perfect courtier’ (I. i. 225). After the healing of the King he vies with Lafeu in attempt to find choice phrases to describe the miracle (II. iii. 1–45). He poses as a traveller, and exhibits those fantastical styles of dress which are so often the subject of Shakespearian satire. Lafeu, the experienced old courtier, easily penetrates his mask: I did think thee, for two ordinaries, to be a pretty wise fellow; thou didst make tolerable vent of thy travel; it might pass. Yet the scarfs and the bannerets about thee did manifoldly dissuade me from believing thee a vessel of too great a burden. (II. iii. 210) Lafeu ‘looks through’ him (II. iii. 225) easily, regarding him as ‘a general offence’, a ‘vagabond’, and ‘no true traveller’ (II. iii. 270, 277). He ‘garters up his arms’ (II. iii. 265), ‘the soul of this man is in his clothes’ (II. v. 49). To others he is a ‘vile rascal’ and ‘that jackanapes with scarfs’ (III. v. 84–5). Finally he is Monsieur Parolles, the gallant militarist—that was his own phrase—that had the whole theorie of war in the knot of his scarf, and the practice in the chape1 of his dagger. (IV. iii. 162) His soldiership is false through and through. During the war Bertram’s brother-officers devise the practical joke to reveal his cowardice. They recognize that his proposed expedition to recapture the lost Drum is a pretence, expecting him to ‘return with an invention, and clap upon you two or three probable lies’ (III. vi. 104). This is true: he deliberately, like Falstaff, plans to give himself ‘some hurts’ and say he got them ‘in exploit’; and yet he would much prefer merely to cut his ‘garments’ and break his ‘Spanish sword’ (IV. i. 40–52). But the trap is set, he is captured and blindfolded by his comrades, whom he thinks the enemy; shows himself for what he is; and finally faces his compatriots a confessed coward and traitor.


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And here we come up against his remarkable bearing; for he comes out of it well. What we admire in him is his utter lack of self-deception, which is more than we can say for many of Shakespeare’s greater persons: he is, with himself, sincere. From the start Helena, though well aware of his faults, could yet recognize, with a truly Shakespearian insight, a peculiar self-consistency, and therefore harmony, in the friend of her beloved Bertram: Who comes here? One that goes with him: I love him for his sake; And yet I know him a notorious liar, Think him a great way fool, solely a coward; Yet these fix’d evils sit so fit in him, That they take place, when virtue’s steely bones Look bleak i’ the cold wind: withal, full oft we see Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly. (I. i. 110) This might seem at first to say merely that his play-acting is so convincing that it gives him precedence (‘place’) over the virtuous. But it is not his show of good, but the ‘evils’, which are said to seem ‘fit’; and, despite the conclusion, which comes in as a concession to morality, the other thought, supported by the imagery, lingers. If my reading is correct, this must be the only instance we have of a Shakespearian person expressing for us that sense of a beyond-good-and-evil harmony which we ourselves so often experience in face of the Shakespearian creation. . . . Later Helena tells Parolles that the ‘composition’ of his ‘valour and fear’, makes a ‘virtue’ which pleases her (I. i. 221–3). When one of the lords overhears his deliberate plans to cover his own admitted cowardice one comments: ‘Is it possible he should know what he is and be that he is?’ (IV. i. 48). It is possible: and it is possible because, with an unusual honesty, he knows, precisely, what he is; what he can, and cannot, do. He does not offend against the law ‘To thine own self be true’ (Hamlet, I. iii. 78). So, after his final unmasking, he first finds the perfect reply: ‘Who cannot be crushed with a plot?’ (IV. iii. 364); and then, left alone, speaks with staggering simplicity: Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great, ’Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more; But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft As captain shall: simply the thing I am Shall make me live. (IV. iii. 370)


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Like Cardinal Wolsey at a similar crisis he perhaps feels his ‘heart’ ‘new-open’d’, and can say, with greater right since it is really no new discovery, ‘I know myself now’ (Henry VIII, III. ii. 367, 379). He is now ‘safest in shame’, for ‘there’s place and means for every man alive’ (IV. iii. 378–9). There is a sense of relief in giving up the foolish struggle to create appearances. The comment on all show, all appearances of honour, is keen. That is his personal tragedy, and, like the greater tragedies in Shakespeare, it is, in its way, a victory. Parolles has honesty unfettered by principle. He sees the nobler values, and can speak finely of both marriage and war; where war is concerned he not only apes, but genuinely likes, them, though well aware that he cannot live them. He never deceives himself, and perhaps he and Helena alone of our people have this integrity; and that may be why she from the start recognized in him a certain harmony. His very being, like Falstaff ’s, constitutes a subtle attack on military honour, and after his fall he realizes that one can live without it. He has, of course, to endure his shame. In the last act he enters with his fine clothes all bedraggled and smelling rank (V. ii. 1–27) from, presumably, a ducking, the indignity suffered by Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo in The Tempest. The pond, like those in The Tempest (IV. i. 182) and the story of ‘Poor Tom’ in King Lear (III. iv. 137), appears to have been stagnant and evil-smelling. Such ponds are in Shakespeare natural associations to vice and degradation. But his wit remains, and he bears himself well. So much for his personal drama: his relation to Bertram raises other issues. He is, of course, on the surface, a dangerous influence, as is Falstaff in respect to Prince Hal. This we have to recognize in distinction from our own sympathies. He is a perverter of youth, as summed up by Lafeu: No, no, no, your son was misled with a snipt-taffeta fellow there, whose villainous saff ron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his colour. (IV. v. 1) Young Bertram had been, indeed, easily gulled, saying to Lafeu: ‘I do assure you, my lord, he is very great in knowledge, and accordingly valiant’ (II. v. 8). Here we have an example of Bertram’s chief failing: a failure in judgement, or recognition. Helena and Lafeu saw through him easily. So does the Countess: A very tainted fellow, and full of wickedness. My son corrupts a well-derived nature With his inducement. (III. ii. 89)


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It is Parolles who stimulates Bertram to licentiousness: ‘I know that knave’, says Mariana; ‘Hang him! One Parolles: a filthy officer he is in those suggestions for the young earl’ (III. v. 17). Again, from Diana: Yond’s that same knave That leads him to these places: were I his lady, I would poison that vile rascal. (III. v. 82) Bertram’s friends expose Parolles in order to reveal to him his own lack of judgement: I would gladly have him see his company anatomized that he might take a measure of his own judgements, wherein so curiously he had set this counterfeit. (IV. iii. 36) Parolles, of course, does not believe in virginity, and has his own defence. But he is sexually quite a-moral. So, in his youthful fashion, though without knowing it, or indeed troubling to think seriously about it at all, is Bertram. This his friends recognize, and their easiest way of revealing to Bertram his own lack of balance is to reveal Parolles’ patent cowardice, since this at least he will understand. Bertram’s love-making in Italy is carefully shown to us. His dissolute life is strongly contrasted with his noble bearing: Helena Which is the Frenchman? Diana He. That with the plume; ’tis a most gallant fellow. I would he loved his wife: if he were honester He were much goodlier: is’t not a handsome gentleman? (III. v. 77) The contrast is pathetic, and there is even pathos in Bertram’s attempt to win Diana to his desires. One of his poetic speeches we have already quoted. Here is another, phrased again with a poetic conviction2 worthy of Troilus: Be not so holy-cruel: love is holy; And my integrity ne’er knew the crafts That you do charge me with. Stand no more off, But give thyself unto my sick desires


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Who then recover: say thou art mine, and ever My love as it begins shall so persever. (IV. ii. 32) This is spoken from a genuine infatuation, and it is hard to see why such love, whilst it lasts, is not ‘holy’. The trouble is, and his words admit it despite his protestations, that the ‘sick desires’ will indeed ‘recover’, and leave him heartwhole and independent; and his following denial merely emphasizes his lack of self-knowledge. We have a normal example of a young man who does not understand himself, and indeed finds it convenient not to do so. It is regarded as quite normal: My mother told me just how he would woo As if she sat in’s heart; she says all men Have the like oaths. (IV. ii. 69) The scene is composed from the viewpoint of the worldly-wise Polonius, who regards it as perfectly natural that Hamlet should try to seduce Ophelia if he gets the chance: it is, indeed, only by ourselves allowing for such a view that we can make any sense of Polonius’ opposition to Hamlet’s suit. Nor does he think that sexual licence will dishonour Laertes in France. Shakespeare himself appears to regard Cassio’s affair with Bianca as the normal behaviour of a young man on active service.3 That he continually drives home the ethical corollaries with a fine penetration should not prevent us from realizing that Shakespeare understood the society of his day and recognized the strength of human instinct. Bertram has complete integrity in matters of war, but is both ignorant of himself and without principle in matters of sex. It is accordingly a just and truly exquisite stroke that, when Bertram joins in the tricking of Parolles and is enjoying his scorn of the man’s cowardice, the blindfolded Parolles, who thinks that he is among enemies, should describe Bertram to his face and before his fellow-officers as ‘a foolish idle boy, but for all that very ruttish’; as ‘a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity and devours up all the fry it finds’; and as ‘that lascivious young boy, the Count’ (IV. iii. 242, 249, 337). Parolles has himself encouraged him in such vices, but it remains to his credit that no one in the play could so well have phrased Bertram’s faults in an idiom that would strike home both to him and to us. With an exquisite irony Bertram is fooled by the plot quite as much as is Parolles himself, to the inner satisfaction, no doubt, of his friends, who have indeed engineered it in order to bring him to his senses. They have already been heard discussing his ‘unchaste’ liaison, and deploring such ‘rebellion’ (i.e. upsurge of sexual instinct) as a universal split in man:


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First Lord Now God delay our rebellion! as we are ourselves, what things we are! Second Lord Merely our own traitors. And as in the common course of all treasons, we still see them reveal themselves, till they attain to their abhorred ends, so he that in this action contrives against his own nobility, in his proper stream o’erflows himself. (IV. iii. 23) Helena also in effect makes the same point, dwelling on the ease with which Bertram could enjoy union with her in mistake for Diana: But, O strange men! That can such sweet use make of what they hate, When saucy trusting of the cozen’d thoughts Defiles the pitchy night: so lust doth play With what it loathes for that which is away. (IV. iv. 21) The particular deception is used for a general indictment of lust as self-deceit, recalling the famous sonnet (129) on lust. Clearly, as the Clown has already explained to us, we are to recognize a universal split in man whereby his sexual instincts fight against his better self. And yet society is also at fault in too readily condoning such male licence, especially in men of birth. Parolles later neatly expresses for us this strangely lax code. When questioned by the King as to Bertram’s affair with Diana, he says that his master is indeed ‘an honourable gentleman’, but with ‘tricks’ in him ‘which gentlemen have’. The King is unsatisfied, and asks if he loved her: Parolles Faith, sir, he did love her; but how? King How, I pray you? Parolles He did love her, sir, as a gentleman loves a woman. King How is that? Parolles He loved her, sir, and loved her not. (V. iii. 245) That is as good an account as we shall get, though Parolles continues to insist that Bertram did in his lustful way love her, and was indeed ‘mad for her’, talking ‘of Satan, and of Limbo and of Furies’ (V. iii. 264). The whole question of sex-relationships, and particularly of aristocratic behaviour, is posed. We may remember that ‘gentle sport’ in Sonnet 96 means ‘wanton behaviour becoming to a gentleman’ (blending T. G. Tucker notes to Sonnets 95 and 96; The Mutual Flame, p. 22).


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In Bertram and Parolles we have a goodly range of satirized qualities which make one complex. They are, briefly, the conventional values of the young aristocrat, clustering about the concept ‘honour’. Bravery, indeed, is there, but it exists on a precipice, always ready to descend to the falsities of court-fashion and, at the limit, the lying braggadocio of such frauds as Parolles. Sexually, it has no values, or those that exist are quite unreliable. Man is divided into honourable soldiership and dishonourable sex, and the way is opened for a number of other falsities, his sexual failings eventually, in the play’s final scene, forcing Bertram into barefaced lying. To put it briefly, such ‘honour’ as his, grand on the battlefield, is not enough: no finer values are present, and he is left at the mercy of a Parolles. In some respects he is Parolles’ inferior, since he lacks those primary virtues which Parolles, in the depths, possesses: self-knowledge and humility. All this was probably felt by Shakespeare as a contemporary danger. Braggart travellers in fantastic dress like Parolles and Italian vice such as Bertram’s, for it was—as the King warned his young officers (II. i. 19–22)—in an Italian atmosphere that such things were likely to occur, were both well-worn themes to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The charge against Bertram resembles that levelled against Claudio, who is also a fine soldier, in Much Ado about Nothing. (I. i. 12–17; V. i. 92–8). Modern superficiality and vice are to be contrasted with the established values of an older world. Parolles significantly compares virginity to ‘an old courtier’, dressed ‘out of fashion’, all ‘richly suited, but unsuitable’ (I. i. 171): virtue is now out of fashion. At the limit, it is a contrast of Renaissance humanism and medieval society. The one is fine in masculine ambition and war, but has many gross failings; the other has a more feminine, more spiritualized, way of life to offer, maintaining respect to the feminine values. We may note that war in this play is, more vividly than anywhere else in Shakespeare, except perhaps in Othello, conceived as contemporary war, with bullets (p. 142). New and old are emphatically contrasted. There are two primary personifications of the old order, the King and the Countess. The King, after recalling his friendship with Bertram’s father, deplores the superficialities of the new generation: In his youth He had the wit, which I can well observe Today in our young lords; but they may jest Till their own scorn return to them unnoted Ere they can hide their levity in honour . . . (I. ii. 31) Remembrance of his friend makes the King dubious of progress:


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Such a man Might be a copy to these younger times; Which, follow’d well, would demonstrate them now But goers backward. (I. ii. 45) Bertram’s father was a man of wisdom, who feared the oncoming generation: ‘Let me not live’, quoth he, ‘After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses All but new things disdain; whose judgements are Mere fathers of their garments; whose constancies Expire before their fashions’. (I. ii. 58) All this is spoken, with sharp dramatic irony, to Bertram, whom we are soon to watch in high ‘disdain’ and failing grievously in ‘judgement’. The Countess had hoped that he would succeed his father in ‘manners’, and that his ‘birthright’ and ‘goodness’ would go hand-in-hand (I. i. 70). But we find him horribly falsifying his birthright, and the symbol of that falsification is the ancestral ring which he gives to Diana during his wooing of her, in exchange for a transient pleasure. It was Helena’s idea that she should ask for it: Now his important blood will nought deny That she’ll demand: a ring the county wears That downward hath succeeded in his house From son to son, some four or five descents Since the first father wore it. This ring he holds In most rich choice; yet in his idle fire To buy his will, it would not seem too dear, Howe’er repented after. (III. vii. 21) Diana follows Helena’s suggestion. At first Bertram is reluctant: It is an honour ’longing to our house, Bequeathed down from many ancestors; Which were the greatest obloquy i’ the world In me to lose. (IV. ii. 42)


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This is the ring which Diana compares with her own sexual ‘honour’ as just such a ‘ring’ likewise ‘bequeathed down from many ancestors’ (IV. ii. 45). In parting with the ring Bertram falsifies those two values which the Countess grouped together: ‘blood’ and ‘virtue’, ‘birthright’ and ‘goodness’ (I. i. 72, 70). He offends against both. His fault is underlined for us by one of his friends: He hath given her his monumental ring, and thinks himself made in the unchaste composition. (IV. iii. 20) It is a sacrifice of a great permanency to a temporary and immoral enjoyment. The ring is again highly charged with radiations in the last act, the Countess being deeply shocked at her son’s irresponsibility: He blushes, and ’tis it. Of six preceding ancestors that gem Conferr’d by testament to the sequent issue, Hath it been owed and worn. (V. iii. 197) The ring performs a function similar to that ‘antique token’, the handkerchief, in Othello (V. ii. 214), the loss of both being regarded as a betrayal of sanctities. ‘Antique’ reminds us of the Sonnets, where it is a key-word in the contrast of modern falsities and old-world piety and integrity.4 In All’s Well that Ends Well it occurs once only, when Parolles accords Lafeu ‘the privilege of antiquity’ (II. iii. 219), but the general contrast here is the same as that of the Sonnets, and to be distinguished from the deployment of old and new generations in the Final Plays. We are directed to think that his acceptance of Helena can alone settle Bertram’s problems for him. In the last act the King, the Countess, and Lafeu discuss his original fault as a failure in ‘estimation’, or valuation, to be perhaps excused on grounds of hot-headed youth, but nevertheless ‘an offence of mighty note’ done to the King and to his mother, and ‘to himself the greatest wrong of all’ (V. iii. 1–15). For such self-delusion is a self-wronging; a wronging of his nobler, and therefore true, self. The news of Helena’s death may be considered to act on him as does that of Fulvia on Antony. The letter which, presumably, tells him of it affects him deeply: ‘There is something in’t that stings his nature, for on the reading it he changed almost into another man’ (IV. iii. 8). True, he speaks lightly of her death soon after (IV. iii. 101), but we later find him admitting his fault, and claiming now to love her. It is here that he mentions Lafeu’s daughter, of whom we had not previously heard, as, in part, his excuse. Asked by the King if he recalls that lady, he answers:


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Admiringly, my liege, at first I stuck my choice upon her, e’er my heart Durst make too bold a herald of my tongue: Where the impression of mine eye infixing, Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me, Which warp’d the line of every other favour; Scorn’d a fair colour, or express’d it stolen; Extended or contracted all proportions To a most hideous object: thence it came That she whom all men praised and whom myself, Since I have lost, have loved, was in mine eye The dust that did offend it. (V. iii. 44) This is the exact obverse of the state of harmony in vision claimed by Shakespeare himself in Sonnets 113 and 114 (discussed in The Mutual Flame, pp. 119–22). It is a state of distorted vision and consequent scorn: that is what we are to suppose was wrong with him. That he is still far from a state of grace may be assumed from his behaviour when cornered. First, he lies mightily about the ring given him by Helena (V. iii, 92–101). Then, when faced by Diana, whom he had wooed so fervently, his words are disgraceful and unchivalrous. Asked if he intends to marry her, he replies: Let your highness Lay a more noble thought upon mine honour Than for to think that I would sink it here. (V. iii. 181) The very use of ‘honour’ in such a context is now, from his lips, a blasphemy. We must, I suppose, realize that when he describes how he ‘boarded her i’ the wanton way of youth’ after she ‘did angle’ for him, showing both ‘infinite cunning’ and ‘modern grace’ (V. iii. 212), this is presumably how he saw her behaviour, in male fashion, after he thought that he had seduced her. But it is bad enough: every phrase rings with the callous attitude of the conventional code. Such is our study of Bertram. As one of the Lords says: The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues. (IV. iii. 83)


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That may serve as a just comment. We have now to consider Helena. Helena possesses those old-world qualities of simplicity, sincerity, and integrity which Bertram lacks. She is loving, humble, and good, and in her there is no lack of piety to her forbears: indeed, her father’s art descends to, and is used by, her. Her first words sound a note of wistful suffering. The Countess thinks that she is grieving for the loss of her father: Countess No more of this, Helena, go to, no more; lest it be rather thought you affect a sorrow than have it. Helena I do affect a sorrow, indeed, but I have it too. (I. i. 60) The note is that of Julia’s ‘The musician likes’—i.e. ‘pleases’—‘me not’ in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (IV. ii. 58); and of Imogen in Cymbeline. Helena, like those, might seem to be going to play the part of a wronged woman, suffering for love. But there is a difference: her feminine humility becomes an active and challenging, almost a male, force. She is generally praised. From her father she inherits fine qualities, and shows honesty and goodness (I. i. 45–53); the Countess regards her as, in effect, her daughter (I. iii. 150–61; IV. v. 11–13); she possesses ‘wisdom and constancy’ amazing in one of her age (II. i. 86–8). But she is always ‘humble’ (II. iii. 89), and will only have Bertram on terms just to him: ‘Nor would I have him till I do deserve him’ (I. iii. 207). Even when her healing of the King has proved her desert, her way of choosing Bertram is to offer her ‘service’ to his ‘guiding power’ in uttermost feminine humility (II. iii. 109): that is her conception of marriage, recalling Portia’s in The Merchant of Venice (III. ii. 149–75). The Countess clearly asserts that she ‘deserves a lord that twenty such rude boys’ as her own son should ‘tend upon’ whilst calling her ‘mistress’, and regards her supposed death as ‘the death of the most virtuous gentlewoman that ever nature had praise for creating’ (III. ii. 83; IV. v. 9). Our social valuations are reversed: nature’s aristocracy, as in the poetry of The Winter’s Tale (p. 106), replaces man’s. ‘We lost a jewel of ’—i.e. ‘in’—‘her’, says the King (V. iii. 1), the image recalling Thaisa in Pericles. Again He lost a wife Whose beauty did astonish the survey Of richest eyes, whose words all ears took captive, Whose dear perfection hearts that scorn’d to serve Humbly called mistress. (V. iii. 15)


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She is almost beyond the human, with the kind of idealization accorded Thaisa, Marina, and Hermione. She is one whose ‘prayers’ Heaven itself ‘delights to hear and loves to grant’ (III. iv. 27). But she is not showy: ‘all her deserving is a reserved honesty’ (III. V. 61). Nor is there anything priggish in her. She can, as we have seen, engage in broad sex-talk with Parolles. She alone of our people has the sympathy to recognize in this strange creature, whom she loves for Bertram’s ‘sake’, both the vicious falsity of his play-acting and yet a certain fitness in his scandalous behaviour which somehow wins our approbation whilst ‘virtue’s steely bones’ are left ‘bleak i’ the cold wind’. To this point the contrast is in Parolles’ favour: the imagery of cold contrasted with the rich humour of his shameless absurdity constitutes a kind of approbation, aesthetic rather than moral; and though in her next lines, calling it an example of the way ‘cold wisdom’ often has to take second place to ‘superfluous folly’ (‘luxurious folly’), she registers a disapproval, the point has, poetically, been made (I. i. 111–17). However that may be, Helena herself certainly stands for more than an ethical ideal; she is feminine ‘honour’ incarnate, her excellence a way of life, to be interpreted in the realm of being rather than of precept. Helena can best be discussed under two main headings, and we shall next consider her as (i) the supreme development of Shakespeare’s conception of feminine love, and (ii) as miracle worker. In ‘The Shakespearian Integrity’ (pp. 218–22) and in my recent study of the Sonnets I have suggested that Shakespeare’s women lovers may be said to have been created from the female element in his own soul. But that does not mean that they are unsatisfactory as studies of women: on the contrary, they are created from an exact, because personal, experience. There is no need to emphasize the depth and subtlety of the love of Viola and Rosalind, or the dramatic force of Juliet and Cleopatra. Love is woman’s peculiar domain, whereas the men are pre-eminent in war and tragedy. The sexes play differing parts, and the woman is at her finest in submission, as in Katharina’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew (V. ii. 137–80) and Portia’s surrender to Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice (III. ii. 149–75); in the other Portia’s admission of feminine weakness in Julius Caesar (II. iv. 39); and in Cleopatra’s resignation of her claims on Antony, respect for his ‘honour’, and invocation of ‘laurelled victory’ on his arms (Antony and Cleopatra, I. iii. 93–101). Examples of this particular contrast of male and female abound; and just such is the contrast of Helena and Bertram. But there is a difference. Here the contrast of woman and man is pretty nearly our whole theme; it is our motivating principle throughout; once recognized, you find it in speech after speech. All our thoughts on ‘honour’, ‘virginity’, and the intermixing of sex and war in metaphor, come to mind. More: not only is Helena, even more than Imogen, the distilled essence of Shakespeare’s view of feminine love, but the woman’s humility, her anxiety to serve, becomes for once


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itself dynamic and assertive. She fights for her love against all odds, and wins: the feminine principle of love asserts itself against the masculine principle of warrior-courage, ‘virginity’ here naturally assuming, as we have seen, terms drawn from warfare. Shakespeare’s heroines are, of course, active and adventurous elsewhere, and sometimes, as do Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, act deliberately to untangle male error and confusion. They often dress as boys, thereby, perhaps, reflecting both the bisexuality of their creator and that of his ‘master-mistress’ ideal (Sonnet 20; and compare the ‘maiden-tongued’ youth of A Lover’s Complaint, 100). But Helena’s bisexuality is at once more realistic and more impressive, relying not at all on the pictorial fiction of disguise, but springing direct from her womanly self. There is never any abrogation of femininity in Shakespeare’s women, whatever the male disguises and bisexual inclusions; and so here we have femininity paradoxically invading the male prerogative of initiative and action. Normally Shakespeare’s women are not brave in face of physical danger: Viola is afraid of the duel, Rosalind faints at the sight of a blood-stained handkerchief, Desdemona goes to her death in terror, Portia in Julius Caesar collapses under the strain of the conspiracy, Lady Macbeth faints, Cleopatra flies from the battle of Actium; and though Juliet’s terror in the Potion-scene is less physical than imaginative, resembling that of Faustus at the end of Marlowe’s play, it marks an extremity which no Shakespearian hero would be allowed to reach. But, as we shall see, Helena, Diana’s ‘knight’ (I. iii. 122), risks torture and death in order to save the King and win a husband. The female values for once become on every level the equal, or superior, of the male. Nowhere else does this happen. The feminine challenge here so directly dramatized can nevertheless be said to be implicit throughout Shakespeare. In all the greater plays we are aware of the female principle challenging the male principle in direct descent from the part played by women in the Comedies. The protagonist, king or soldier, is regularly overthrown by, or subdued to, that in himself which is involved in his relationship to a woman; as in Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra; and both sexual elements can be felt active within the spiritualized strength forming in the protagonist towards the end, and in the final tragic harmony. The dominating importance of women in the Final Plays, except for The Tempest, is clear enough. Now this intuition, ranging from the earliest to the latest plays, is given personal projection in the plot of All’s Well that Ends Well, with Helena as agent. She makes the plot, as do the Duke in Measure for Measure and Prospero in The Tempest. We shall next demonstrate more exactly Helena’s function as Shakespeare’s supreme expression of a woman’s love. It will be, mainly, a matter of poetry. She is utterly humble. Her love is characterized less by desire and possessiveness than by service and adoration, reminiscent of the Sonnets. Her father is forgotten:


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What was he like? I have forgot him: my imagination Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s. I am undone: there is no living, none, If Bertram be away. ’Twere all one That I should love a bright particular star And think to wed it, he is so above me: In his bright radiance and collateral light Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. The ambition in my love thus plagues itself: The hind that would be mated with the lion Must die for love. ’Twas pretty, though a plague, To see him every hour; to sit and draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls, In our heart’s table; heart too capable Of every line and trick of his sweet favour: But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy Must sanctify his reliques. (I. i. 93) Here is a Bertram very different from the man we have been discussing; it is Bertram known by love; the potential, perhaps the real, man. Observe that Helena herself subscribes whole-heartedly to those social and aristocratic valuations which her own personality, as a dramatic force, serves to attack. Notice, too, the peculiar tone of it, like Paulina’s words over Leontes’ child (The Winter’s Tale, II. iii. 97–102), exquisitely handling physical detail with a consummate purity of perception. ‘Our heart’s table’ recalls the difficult Sonnet 24 on perfect love-sight (The Mutual Flame, pp. 40–1). Here is another revealing passage, spoken to the Countess: Then I confess, Here on my knee, before high Heaven and you, That before you, and next unto high Heaven, I love your son. My friends were poor, but honest; so’s my love. Be not offended; for it hurts him not That he is loved of me. I follow him not By any token of presumptuous suit; Nor would I have him till I do deserve him; Yet never know how that desert should be. I know I love in vain, strive against hope;


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Yet in that captious and intenible sieve, I still pour in the waters of my love, And lack not to lose still: thus, Indian-like, Religious in mine error, I adore The sun, that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more. My dearest madam, Let not your hate encounter with my love For loving where you do: but if yourself Whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth, Did ever in so true a flame of liking Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian Was both herself and love; O, then give pity To her, whose state is such, that cannot choose But lend and give where she is sure to lose; That seeks not to find that her search implies, But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies. (I. iii. 199) Here I point less to any especial accents in the poetry than to the statement. ‘Next high Heaven’ recalls ‘next my Heaven the best’ in Sonnet 110. Especially important is the reference to Dian, our central deity. Helena’s love exists at the meetingplace of Dian and desire: ‘was both herself and love’. We are continually forced towards a paradoxical identification of virginity and sexual love, pointing to the ‘married chastity’ of The Phoenix and the Turtle. That, if it means ‘married virginity’, cannot be, and is not, dramatically maintained; but the equivalent of purity may have been maintained in Shakespeare’s personal love for the Fair Youth adored in the Sonnets; and he may be working from that. The powers of virgin love are exquisitely described in one of Helena’s early speeches. Parolles has been arguing against virginity, and she breaks in with: Not my virginity yet:5 There shall your master have a thousand loves, A mother and a mistress and a friend, A phoenix, captain and an enemy, A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign, A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear; His humble ambition, proud humility, His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet, His faith, his sweet disaster; with a world Of pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms That blinking Cupid gossips. Now shall he—


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I know not what he shall. God send him well! The court’s a learning place, and he is one— (I. i. 181) The lines, with their broken conclusion, insistently remind us of Viola’s semiconfession of her love to Orsino in Twelfth Night, breaking off on ‘Sir, shall I to this lady?’ (II. iv. 105–24); and of Cleopatra’s Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it; Sir, you and I have loved, but there’s not it; That you know well. Something it is I would— O, my oblivion is a very Antony, And I am all forgotten. (Antony and Cleopatra, I. iii. 87) The thoughts are different, but the hesitant phrasing, the sense of unutterable worlds behind, is the same in each. The only other comparison I recall which seems at all adequate is Tolstoy’s description of the birth of Prince Andrew’s love for Natasha in the Nineteenth Chapter of the Sixth Book of War and Peace: In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, and something new and joyful stirred in his soul. He felt happy, and at the same time sad. He had absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep. What about? His former love? The little princess? His disillusionments? . . . His hopes for the future? . . . Yes and no. The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him, and that limited and material something that he, and even she, was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang. (World’s Classics, Vol. II, pp. 67–8) It is perhaps not surprising that on this particular ground these two most unchallengeable human delineators of the modern era stand so close together. Helena’s speech is difficult, but there is no reason to suppose a missing line. ‘There’ cannot surely, as has sometimes been argued, mean ‘at the Court’. Helena’s words show an enjoyed fondling of love-thoughts, and must accordingly refer to her own love of Bertram rather than that of any rival, or rivals. The opening I take, in direct succession to her preceding remarks to Parolles, to mean: ‘I shall not part with my virginity to anyone yet, because therein your master has an infinite love’. I do not think that, at this early stage in her story, it can mean ‘In giving your master my virginity I shall give him a thousand loves’, since


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she has no good reason at this stage to expect such an event. Not that the total meaning would be so very different, either way, since virginity, given or withheld, remains the key-thought. As in the Christian scheme virginity is here less the denial of love than an expression of it: it is conceived as a positive power. In The Christian Renaissance (p. 39) I have, in emphasizing the importance of virginity in Christian dogma, suggested that ‘to hold up virginity as an ideal is merely to raise sex to an infinite value’. That is what happens here: the love is infinite, ‘a thousand loves’; it is the window to a great insight. It may be related to the state of perfect integration from which poetry is born, a state which is, as Shelley in his Defence of Poetry tells us, ‘at war with every base desire’. Such a state is a state of inclusion, wisdom, and forgiveness: this Helena claims, and her ability later on to work the miracle is evidence of her right.6 This love, like Shakespeare’s own ranging poetic vision, is universal and so a number of human categories are contained. It is not sexually limited: it is simultaneously maternal, sexual, and a friendship in the Elizabethan sense, whereby ‘friend’ was as strong a term as ‘lover’, partly perhaps because of the many ardent man-to-man friendships and idealizations, such as Shakespeare’s in the Sonnets. The ‘Phoenix’ must be understood in terms of its use throughout Love’s Martyr, the collection in which Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle appeared. The symbol appears at key-moments in Shakespeare’s esoteric thought from Timon of Athens onwards, and is fully discussed in The Mutual Flame. The Phoenix is bisexual, an idealized creature, and chaste. In precise terms of ‘Phoenix’ and ‘Turtle’ Bertram, from Helena’s view, would more exactly be ‘Phoenix’, with her adoring self as ‘Turtle’; but she is imagining herself as she might be from his view, and her own bisexuality, her blend of female love and male vigour, her virgin chastity combined with beauty and wisdom, all entitle her to the term as that to which he might, and should, aspire. War categories are also involved: she will be both his ‘captain’ and his ‘enemy’. All Bertram’s interests and ambitions as warrior are somehow contained, and the male values safeguarded, Helena boldly entering this domain as his ‘captain’, so asserting the priority of her love, and even as his ‘enemy’. Why? The next lines clarify the word. This love is as a ‘guide’; being in touch with his greater self and speaking thence, it naturally becomes a ‘goddess’ and, in human terms, his ‘sovereign’. Every value, sacred or secular, is included, and from this height Bertram is to be counselled, advised, warned, even opposed, for his failings are admitted; and so her love is, in its way, a ‘traitress’, aligning itself with opposing forces, and yet simultaneously, and accordingly, a ‘dear’, or thing of highest worth. Paradox is involved, and becomes now explicit. Love such as Helena’s is, at its best, a great aspiration, and yet one born of humility; in her pride and humility are unified; and this is one with his reasons for both pride and humility. She has become almost a divine or poetic principle, overruling, watching, containing him; or rather it is not she, but the Love overarching, overruling, both, as we find it


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in the Sonnets (The Mutual Flame, pp. 41, 61, 94). ‘His jarring concord and his discord dulcet’ suggests the whole Shakespearian universe in its blend of tempests and music; but here in particular it denotes both Helena’s effect on him and also his own lack of integration as surveyed by the now almost impersonal Love for which it exists as harmony; as when Helena accepts Parolles’ faults since ‘they sit so fit in him’ that ‘virtue’ appears ‘bleak’, ‘cold’, and metallic in comparison (I. i.113). This is the poetic, Shakespearian, view of man. Helena’s love sees Bertram as he potentially is, that core and inmost music of his personality which no faults can disturb—Parolles’ ‘simply the thing I am’—and this outspaces the moral judgement, which, though present, is surpassed, as when Mariana says of Angelo that she craves ‘no other nor no better man,’ since ‘best men are moulded out of faults’ (Measure for Measure, V. i. 440). So here Helena is ‘his faith’, that which believes in, recognizes, and works for, his own highest good and potential excellence; but, since that may, as in the greater scheme of God’s dealings with man—and these are never far from Helena’s thinking—bring suffering, she, or the great Love, is, too, his ‘sweet disaster’, recalling Saint Paul’s sense of happy bondage in servitude to Christ. But the thought is getting too weighty, and returns to all the little ways and sentimentalities of love, though even here remembering religion in the word ‘christendoms’, Christian names or nicknames, sponsored by (‘gossips’) blind (‘blinking’) Cupid. The speech offers a definition of perfect love, which labours for its object’s good; which, seeing the ‘heart’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II. ii. 155), the Hindu atman, or divine spark, knows, includes, and forgives all; and which, in Shakespeare’s own experience, made him see all humanity, including all that was evil and ugly, as aspects, like Helena’s understanding of Parolles, of the wondrous being whom he loved (Sonnets 113 and 114): this is the exact opposite of Bertram’s distorted, scornful vision of man already (p. 130) discussed. What Helena is describing is an authentic part of the great poetic panorama, of the same stuff and significance as the lucid patterns of Pope’s Essay on Man and Shelley’s Defence of Poetry.7 This careful definition serves as a prologue to Helena’s story. Directly after it we find her love beginning to act in her as a source of magical power: Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. What power is it which mounts my love so high, That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye? The mightiest space in fortune nature brings To join like likes, and kiss like native things.


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Impossible be strange attempts to those That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose What hath been cannot be: who ever strove To show her merit that did miss her love? The King’s disease—my project may deceive me, But my intents are fixed, and will not leave me. (I. i. 235) This is the moment of conception. Emphasis is laid on man’s, or woman’s, ‘free’ abilities, given by the ‘sky’, to use what is ‘in’ himself, the more cosmic suggestion of ‘sky’ marking a distinction from reliance on a transcendental, or theological, ‘Heaven’. The psychic potentialities in question are hampered by the ‘dull’ elements of material inertia (as at Sonnet 44). The ‘power’ is either directly born of Helena’s love, or at least intimately associated with it, infusing it with confidence, even pride (‘mounts . . . high’): we may recall the powers of love described by Biron in Love’s Labour’s Lost (IV. iii. 289–365). It is recognized as a reality beyond sense-perception (‘That . . . eye’), which can break through even the strongest (‘mightiest space’) social barriers in the cause of natural affinity (‘nature . . . things’). We must not stifle enterprise by assessing difficulties in terms of common sense (‘weigh . . . sense’), nor forget that such things have happened before. The emphasis falls on natural, yet spiritual, power, though the contrast of ‘Heaven’ and ‘sky’ is not elsewhere maintained, the more orthodox concepts being generally used. The distinction, though often valuable and sometimes inevitable, cannot be more than provisional. So Helena goes ahead with her plan to heal the King, and succeeds. The actual healing we shall discuss later. Helena claims always to serve Bertram; he remains her master. When, after the healing, she chooses him for her husband, she first takes the great step from Dian to Love, from virginity to marriage: Now Dian, from thy altar do I fly; And to imperial Love, that god most high, Do my sighs stream. (II. iii. 80) Then, coming to Bertram, she proposes as follows: I dare not say I take you; but I give Me and my service ever whilst I live, Into your guiding power. (II. iii. 109)


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She speaks like other Shakespearian heroines, recognizing the man as her lord and master; and yet here that very recognition has taken the initiative, assuming the male prerogative. After Bertram has gone to the war, she recognizes that she has driven him away, and speaks poignantly of his danger. It is, as a Shakespearian woman, her part both to fear and to respect, like Katharina (The Taming of the Shrew, V. ii. 148–52), the hardships and dangers which fall to man. She, whose art is healing, fears the very thought of the dangers which Bertram must incur. He has written: ‘Till I have no wife, I have nothing in France’ (III. ii. 77). So in remorse she will leave France. Here is her soliloquy, remarkable for its maternal, protective, tone, for its fine depicting, unusual in Shakespeare, of contemporary warfare, and above all for the sudden dignity, witnessing to the ability of Shakespeare’s poetry to live its own lines of thought, with which she, who has long recognized his nobler self, now, as it were, crowns the scornful young man before our eyes by the simple use of his title. The name ‘Rousillon’ (spelt in the Folio ‘Rossillion’) sounds twice, like an awakening, and perhaps nowhere else in Shakespeare is a name used with so resounding an effect: Nothing in France until he has no wife! Thou shalt have none, Rousillon, none in France; Then hast thou all again. Poor lord! is’t I That chase thee from thy country and expose Those tender limbs of thine to the event Of the non-sparing war? And is it I That drive thee from the sportive court, where thou Wast shot at with fair eyes, to be the mark Of smoky muskets? O you leaden messengers, That ride upon the violent speed of fire, Fly with false aim; move the still-piecing air That sings with piercing; do not touch my lord. Whoever shoots at him, I set him there; Whoever charges on his forward breast, I am the caitiff that do hold him to’t; And, though I kill him not, I am the cause His death was so effected; better ’twere I met the ravin lion when he roar’d With sharp constraint of hunger; better ’twere That all the miseries which nature owes Were mine at once. No, come thou home, Rousillon, Whence honour but of danger wins a scar, As oft it loses all: I will be gone; My being here it is that holds thee hence.


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Shall I stay here to do ’t? No, no, although The air of paradise did fan the house And angels offic’d all. I will be gone, That pitiful rumour may report my flight, To consolate thine ear. (III. ii. 103) Here there is full recognition both of her own fault, if for once we may so call it, and also of the true greatness of her husband; for a warrior’s is a great calling. From a woman’s, maternal, view, she surveys its terror, the danger it is to be a man. So Bertram is twice given his title, ‘Rousillon’. In direct contrast to her earlier soliloquy she here resigns her rights to the intimacy of a Christian name, while freely allowing him his rights to all that aristocratic honour which made him reject her, but which she herself never repudiates; and on her lips the splendid name makes him indeed noble, creating for us his true self, known by love, the word’s music sounding as the music of his young warrior soul. So she composes a letter in sonnet-form for the Countess, admitting the fault of her ‘ambitious love’ and saying how she will do penance as a pilgrim, and labour to ‘sanctify’ her husband’s ‘name’ with a ‘zealous fervour’ (III. iv. 4–17). It is a religious and penitential act; she is still labouring to serve his interests. Whether we can respond as we are meant to to her later actions is less certain. Though she certainly knew that Bertram had gone to serve the Duke (III. i. 54), we must not suppose that her finding him in Florence was part of a deliberate plan, since her letter to the Countess had already urged his immediate return to France (III. iv. 8); and as for her substituting of herself for Diana as the object of Bertram’s passion, we can at least note that in doing this she is in effect saving him from a sin which, as we have seen, she regards as serious: again she is, in fact, serving his best interests. As for the symbolic ring which she wins from him, we can endow this with whatever ancestral powers we like: possessing that, she may be supposed to know that, according to the terms of his own semi-oracular letter (III. ii. 60), she will eventually possess his love. All this we must accept as best we may: we have to forgive as much, as Tolstoy saw, in most of Shakespeare’s plays. No doubt such dramatists could do better were we willing to sit in the theatre for treble the time they normally demand, but we are not. What we can say is this, that her later actions all tend, finally, to serve and rebuild Bertram’s better self; and whatever we think of these scenes, they do certainly serve to show that, except when on the field of battle, Bertram needs guiding, since his judgement is immature and his values in chaos. It may seem presumptuous in Helena to cast herself for such a role, but she is no ordinary woman; or rather she has the best qualities of an ordinary woman developed to so high a pitch that she becomes almost a saint.


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Religious categories are involved: they cluster round her as the values of war surround Bertram; and she actually performs a miracle. We pass now to consider Helena as miracle-worker. The miracle grows from a world well saturated with religious thought and language. Religious phrases are continual, such as: ‘Heaven aiding’, ‘Doubt not but Heaven’, ‘O dear Heaven, bless’ (IV. iv. 12, 18; V. iii. 71); and so on. A ‘quarrel’ may be called ‘holy’; so may love, even by a seducer (III. i. 4; IV. ii. 32). Theological terms occur: ‘With the divine forfeit of his soul’, ‘He will sell the feesimple of his salvation’; ‘Dost thou put upon me at once the office of God and the Devil?’ (III, vi, 33; IV. iii. 314; V. ii. 52). The Countess’ prayers hope to ‘pluck down’ blessings on her son’s head. (I. i. 79); Helena has influence with a religious dignitary said to be ‘one of the greatest in the Christian world’ (IV. iv. 2). Parolles tells how Bertram in love ‘talked of Satan, and of Limbo, and of Furies’ (V. iii. 264). People moralize naturally on human life as ‘a mingled yarn’ of ‘good and ill’, of virtues and vices (IV. iii. 83). The Clown, as we have seen, knows himself a ‘wicked creature’, and marries in order to ‘repent’ (I. iii. 38), going on to talk of ‘young Charbon the puritan and old Poysam the papist’ (I. iii. 58). The Countess, he says, is well but for two things: One, that she’s not in Heaven, whither God send her quickly! the other, that she’s in earth, from whence God send her quickly! (II. iv. 12) He takes, indeed, a bitter view, talking of ‘the black prince’, ‘the prince of darkness’, ‘the devil’, and continuing: I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always loved a great fire; and the master I speak of ever keeps a good fire. But, sure, he is the prince of the world; let his nobility remain in’s court. I am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little for pomp to enter. Some that humble themselves may; but the many will be too chill and tender, and they’ll be for the flowery way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire. (IV. v. 50) ‘Pomp’ is satirized, and humility, the humility of a Helena, honoured. The speech marks a complete surrender to the religious, ascetic, point of view. Naturally it displeases Lafeu, the Lord. It is not so much that the Clown is wrong as that this recognition of human evil is just where the real problem of living, as Lafeu would see it, begins. Parolles has no morals; the Clown has little else. Neither face the complexities of life. Helena functions as a bridge between religion and the court, between humility and honour. In a world of divided, sin-struck humanity she is a redeeming power,


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a perfect unit: that is her function. Even the Clown admits ‘that she was the sweet marjoram of the salad, or rather the herb of grace’ (IV. v. 17). She it is who can speak words which Imogen might have spoken, like: No, no, although The air of paradise did fan the house And angels offic’d all. (III. ii. 127) Her very prayers, according to the Countess, are peculiarly valid: What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive Unless her prayers, whom Heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice. (III. iv. 25) She functions, within the play, almost as Christ within the Christian Scheme. The play is a microcosm of that scheme. Naturally, her love is ‘religious’: Thus, Indian-like, Religious in mine error, I adore The sun, that looks upon his Worshippers But knows of him no more. (I. iii. 212) That is spoken from her humility: we are not to regard her love as idolatry. Her love possesses, as we have seen, both poetic integrity and religious purity, and it is right that in its pursuit she should become a pilgrim in holy dress, going to the sanctuary of Saint Jaques le Grand and lodging ‘at the Saint Francis’ (III. v. 34– 7), the whole venture being called ‘a holy undertaking’ accomplished ‘with most austere sanctimony’ (IV. iii. 59). Like the Duke’s disguise as a Friar in Measure for Measure, all this has a more than plot-meaning: associatively and visually it marks an addition to the protagonist’s stature. And yet there is nothing prudish or ascetic about her. Nor does she in any sense oppose the courtly, aristocratic, valuations. She both accepts and admires them: they are part of her. The idealization is so uncompromising, and yet so inclusive and so firmly based, since, as we have seen, her consciousness functions on the plane of Shakespearian poetry itself, that we are all but forced to believe that her very being is beyond criticism, and see Bertram’s behaviour accordingly. This is, pretty nearly, equivalent to calling the play a religious morality, with Helena as


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a semi-divine person, or some new type of saint. And it is true that our central scenes are formal and ritualistic, rather like the formality of the tournament in Pericles. (II. ii). Her choosing of a husband is formal: she passes from lord to lord as in a sort of trance, her rhymed speeches driving home the ritual meaning. The earlier and crucial scene of the healing is also ritualistically felt, with formal rhymes and chant. And here indeed we approach the play’s heart. For, whatever the poetry says it is hard to believe it alone: we want dramatic action. Here we have it. Helena from the start insisted that she did not want Bertram until she deserved him (p. 135). She wins her right by the miracle, and by that alone; and yet the miracle is itself, as we shall see, a derivative from her love. We shall now inspect this crucial event. It is, as happens in other late plays, a development on a more metaphysical level of dramatic patterns in the Comedies: here we can point to Rosalind functioning as miracle-worker in As You Like It. Our nearest analogy from the latest plays is the art of Cerimon, together with the ‘sacred physic’ and ‘skill’ of Marina, in Pericles (III. ii; V. i. 74, 76). But our present miracle is not quite like anything else in Shakespeare: it is closer to us, more realistically conceived in point of detail, it speaks less to a ‘mystical’ than to what might be called a psychical or ‘spiritualistic’ understanding. Since Helena’s function is so clearly stated to be that of a medium only for the greater powers, we have the less excuse for questioning it on grounds of probability. Helena comes to the King with a power which descends from her father. She is thus credited with preserving and using her parental heritage in contrast to Bertram whose qualities are precisely those which did not characterize his father (p. 115), and who parts with his ancestral ring. Her father, Gerard de Narbon, was more than an ordinary physician, and nearer to Cerimon in Pericles, who says: I hold it ever Virtue and cunning were endowments greater Than nobleness and riches. Careless heirs May the two latter darken and expend, But immortality attends the former, Making a man a god. (Pericles, III. ii. 26) So, too, de Narbon’s skill is closely associated with ‘honesty’, or integrity. He was one, according to the Countess, whose skill was almost as great as his honesty; had it stretched so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work. (I. i. 22)


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Indeed, adds Lafeu, ‘he was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality’ (I. i. 35). The skill concerned appears to exist in close relation to its owner’s personal virtues (‘honesty’), and to be nearer to some variety of occult wisdom, or spirit-power, than to anything which we can call medical science. As in The Winter’s Tale, only with more of a close-pinned realism, such esoteric secrets are, so far as may be, hinted, and indeed emphasized, without breaking the bounds of dramatic propriety, as normally understood. Helena possessed her father’s notes: You know my father left me some prescriptions Of rare and proved effects, such as his reading And manifest experience had collected For general sovereignty; and that he will’d me In heedfull’st reservation to bestow them As notes, whose faculties inclusive were, More than they were in note; amongst the rest, There is a remedy, approved, set down, To cure the desperate languishings whereof The king is render’d lost. (I. iii. 229) This is the basis of our miracle. It sounds at first ordinary enough; but we may observe that the notes are considered of more general (‘inclusive’) application than a superficial reading would suggest. The Countess fears that the King and his physicians would scorn a ‘poor unlearned virgin’ after the ‘doctrine’ of their ‘schools’ has already pronounced its verdict (I. iii. 243–50). This may appear strange in view of her earlier remark that, had de Narbon been alive, the King might have been cured (I. i. 25), but the discrepancy is, as we shall see, part of the dramatic plan. Helena replies: There’s something in’t, More than my father’s skill, which was the great’st Of his profession, that his good receipt Shall for my legacy be sanctified By the luckiest stars in Heaven. (I. iii. 250) The lines are obscure: I take ‘receipt’ to refer to the prescription (as at II. i. 108), rather than to the King’s ‘acceptance’. If so, it means: ‘There is more to it than my father’s skill, for I feel that his valuable prescription will in my hands (“for my legacy”) somehow be blessed by God.’ She herself, whose prayers, as we are elsewhere told, are peculiarly valid, is claiming to have divine assistance


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and support. And here we may recall that her plan’s original conception (i) grew directly from out of her own love of Bertram and (ii) entered her consciousness as a power independent of sense-perception: What power is it which mounts my love so high, That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye? (I. i. 239) Her determination to visit the King flowered directly from a state of strong spiritual impregnation, born of love. So now, asked if she really believes in divine support, she answers briefly: ‘Ay, madam, knowingly’ (I. iii. 258). We are beyond science: transcendental, or occult, categories have entered our field. She goes to Paris. We are, as happens in The Winter’s Tale, gradually attuned to the possibility of miracle by Lafeu’s introductory speech to the King, wherein he reports, in a light semi-humorous style, that he has seen a medicine ‘able to breathe life into a stone’, and raise the dead. Next, claiming to have left his ‘light deliverance’ for serious talk, he tells how he has spoken With one that, in her sex, her years, profession, Wisdom and constancy, hath amazed me more Than I dare blame my weakness. (II. i. 86) Will the King see her, and after that ‘laugh’ (II. i. 90) at him, if he wishes to? Again, we see that it is not all ‘science’; Helena’s own qualities are involved. Lafeu is amazed at her blend of female with male ‘wisdom’ and ‘constancy’. It is all very strange. Observe that there is some risk of mockery. Helena is brought before the King, and tells him of her father’s art: On’s bed of death Many receipts he gave me; chiefly one Which as the dearest issue of his practice, And of his old experience the only darling, He bade me store up as a triple eye, Safer than mine own two, more dear. I have so; And, hearing your high majesty is touch’d With that malignant cause, wherein the honour Of my dear father’s gift stands chief in power, I come to tender it and my appliance, With all bound humbleness. (II. i. 107)


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The legacy appears now to be rather more than a written prescription. It is a choice secret, to be ‘stored up’, and actually compared to a ‘triple eye’. This is the ‘third eye’ of occult doctrine and practice, located on the forehead and used in spirit-healing as a source of powerful rays.8 It is here regarded as a sense more valuable (‘dear’) than the physical senses, and we shall naturally relate it to that experience of a love-born power offering a sight other than sense-perception which was the motivating impulse of Helena’s whole scheme. Helena accordingly offers not merely a ‘prescription’, but rather this secret together with her own ‘appliance’. Her own mediumistic gifts, developing from love, will be engaged; but it is all offered with humility. The King is at first incredulous. But why? We know that he has been speaking ‘mourningly’ of de Narbon (I. i. 35), and we have heard him remark to Bertram, ‘If he were living, I would try him yet’, since the other doctors have only worn him out ‘with several applications’ (I. ii. 73). Now he gets a wonderful posthumous opportunity, and refuses: We thank you, maiden; But may not be so credulous of cure When our most learned doctors leave us, and The congregated college have concluded That labouring art can never ransom nature From her inaidable estate. I say we must not So stain our judgement, or corrupt our hope, To prostitute our past-cure malady To empirics, or to dissever so Our great self and our credit, to esteem A senseless help, when help past sense we deem. (II. i. 117) This constitutes a contradiction, both of the King’s own former speech—though perhaps even there ‘try him’ underlined a doubt—and of the general recognition, by the Countess and Lafeu, of de Narbon’s superlative abilities. And yet it is easy to see what is happening. The Countess has already warned us that the King will refuse, and we can say that Shakespeare has been very subtly at work attuning us by degrees to regard Helena’s cure as within the realm of spirit-healing in strong contrast to the official services of the medical profession.9 We could only make complete sense of the King’s attitude by supposing that the term ‘triple eye’ has made him realize that more was involved in de Narbon’s art than he had supposed. Either way, the main issue is clear, and from now on there is no doubt. The King, to put it bluntly, is afraid of making a fool of himself. Helena’s argument in reply is important. She does not waste time urging her father’s famous skill, but rather insists that divine powers can work through so


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humble an instrument as herself. Hitherto, except for two concluding and abrupt couplets from the King, both have spoken in blank verse, but now Helena speaks wholly in rhyme: What I can do can do no hurt to try, Since you set up your rest ’gainst remedy. He that of greatest works is finisher Oft does them by the weakest minister: So holy writ in babes hath judgement shown, When judges have been babes; great floods have flown From simple sources; and great seas have dried When miracles have by the greatest been denied. Oft expectation fails, and most oft there Where most it promises; and oft it hits Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits. (II. i. 137) Observe the gnomic, formal, incantatory quality of the rhymes, functioning, as in Helena’s first recognition of her own magical powers, as the language of inspiration: she seems to be mesmerizing the King. He is, however, still reluctant, though from now on the two speakers interweave with each other in rhyme. Helena continues, in directly religious, and here orthodox, terms: Inspired merit so by breath is barr’d: It is not so with Him that all things knows, As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows; But most it is presumption in us when The help of Heaven we count the act of men. Dear sir, to my endeavours give consent; Of Heaven, not me, make an experiment. (II. i. 151) The King asks how long the cure will take? She answers in powerful incantatory style: The great’st grace lending grace, Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring; Ere twice in murk and occidental damp Moist Hesperus hath quench’d his sleepy lamp; Or four and twenty times the pilot’s glass Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass;


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What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly— Health shall live free, and sickness freely die. (II. i. 163) Uttermost humility is maintained: Helena claims no power of her own. Even on the plane of nature, it is clear that no health is given; it is there already; only the obstruction is removed, so that nature, the full cosmic powers, may function unimpeded. The King asks Helena what she is prepared to stake on her own belief. She has already told the Countess that she is prepared to risk her life (I. iii. 255–7) and now proposes the alternative of death with torture. It is precisely this willingness on her part, this embracing of the male values of mortal hazard, the Fortinbras values, which turns the scale. Now the King enters Helena’s world, his surrender being marked by his first full-length speech in the full flood of rhyme, beginning: Methinks in thee some blessed spirit doth speak His powerful sound within an organ weak . . . (II. i. 178) Helena’s weakness is throughout emphasized, by herself and others; but she is a channel for greater powers, and in that trust risks her life. The King recognizes that ‘impossibility’ may, after all, make sense; for such a girl so to hazard her ‘youth’, ‘beauty’, ‘wisdom’ and ‘courage’, he says, argues either ‘skill infinite’, or some form of desperation (II. i. 184–7). He accepts her contract of healing or death; but, if successful, she asks in return for the hand of any lord it is in the King’s ‘power’ to give (II. i. 197). The King, now wholly under her influence, speaks a rhymed speech, in high excitement, almost triumph; and so this extraordinary scene, offering probably the most skilful dramatic use of rhyme in Shakespeare, closes. That the healing is, as near as may be, or at least to science appears, a miracle, is re-emphasized by the subsequent dialogue of Lafeu and Parolles, with Bertram significantly both present and tongue-tied: Lafeu They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. Parolles Why, ’tis the rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times. Bertram And so ’tis. (II. iii. 1)


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We have recently found blank verse catching fire, as it were, and blossoming into rhyme; now we circle back to prose, used to mark the appallingly realistic, near-distance, non-visionary, impact of the miracle. Perhaps nowhere else in Shakespeare are such stylistic variations so effective. Observe that Parolles is genuinely interested, while Bertram remains perfunctory and unimpressed. Knowing Helena so well as a humble retainer in his mother’s house, he probably finds it impossible to see her as a person of importance. He may be jealous, or just uninterested; but the fact remains that throughout the subsequent dialogue he says no more. This is most important, and should be underlined in production: his silent presence on the stage should speak volumes. The more Lafeu expatiates on the miracle, the more keenly Parolles tries to draw level, finding phrases or pretending that he would have found them. Comedy is used, as Bernard Shaw uses it in Saint Joan, as a bridge towards reception of an event so utterly beyond the normal, beyond the ken ‘of all the learned and authentic fellows’ who gave out the King as ‘incurable’ (II. iii. 14–16). But Lafeu’s phrases are themselves weighty enough, and deeply significant: a ‘novelty to the world’, ‘a showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor’, ‘the very hand of Heaven’ (II. iii. 24–38). The personal weakness of Helena as merely the medium, the purified channel, of the transcendent, or cosmic, powers, is rightly stressed: In a most weak and debile minister, great power, great transcendence: which should, indeed, give us a further use to be made than alone the recovery of the King, as to be generally thankful. (II. iii. 40) That is, Lafeu thinks that such powers should be more widely developed. Helena functions as a medium only; but this function is one with her poetic, Shakespearian, insight, born of love; and both may be related to her virginity. We may seem to have moved far from social considerations, and yet they, too, are contained. This speech marks a fine extension of our former thoughts regarding the relative merits of virtue and rank: it is found that Heaven works directly through a simple girl, of humble origin.10 This is the girl whom Bertram, who shows no interest in the miracle, rejects on grounds of birth: and Parolles, who does at least try to show interest, has told us that ‘he’s of a most facinorous spirit that will not acknowledge it to be the ___’: he breaks off, and perhaps gestures to Bertram to complete his sentence; but it is Lafeu who continues with ‘very hand of Heaven’ (II. iii. 35). Any able producer would make full use of Bertram’s silent, sulking, presence. Such an invasion of the story by an event beyond normality is nothing strange among Shakespeare’s greater plays. We have only to think of the ghosts and other supernatural phenomena of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth, the inflated naturalism of King Lear, the symbolic and semi-transcendental


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tempests in work after work, the magical powers of Cerimon, the resurrections of Thaisa and Hermione, the visionary appearances of Diana and Jupiter, Queen Katharine’s vision in Henry VIII. Some of these events, such as the unusual storms in King Lear and elsewhere, are poetic fabrications, for a purpose; nor need we ourselves believe in Jupiter as our god. But much of what happens in Macbeth can be paralleled among the phenomena of spiritualism; and the resurrection of Hermione may be allowed to shadow a truth regarding death which no Christian should find strange. What, however, is so remarkable in All’s Well that Ends Well is the more near-distance, immediate and detailed, treatment of transcendence, the dramatist labouring hard to convince us of its reality; a quality driven home by Lafeu’s exquisite prose comments, the more effective in that they follow our earlier poetic excitement like a douche of cold water, which nevertheless merely awakes us to the amazing fact. We are faced with an example of spirit-healing of a kind which anyone who chooses can witness in the public demonstrations of our own day. This is not the same as faith-healing, but rather the release, through a medium, of cosmic powers which so reinforce the organism that the obstructing element is dissolved. Such is the ‘miracle’, if so we choose to call it, of All’s Well that Ends Well. No one who has read, and taken to heart, the New Testament, need be surprised, either at Helena’s, or for that matter Cerimon’s, powers. Certainly if we do not respond properly to Helena’s achievement—if we regard it merely as an impossible fiction—we shall receive little of importance. We shall merely rank ourselves beside Bertram as one who fails to recognize the transcendent when he meets it; and there is probably no more dangerous error than that. True, we need not wish to be married to it, and a difficulty remains. But then Helena is herself no more than a medium. She is a very ordinary, if exceptional, girl: that is her paradox. However we look at it, Bertram’s rejection is to be regarded as a great sin, given weighty theological expression. When, after her supposed death, he claims to have come to love her, the King comments: That thou did’st love her, strikes some scores away From the great compt, but love that comes too late Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried To the great sender turns a sour offence, Crying, ‘That’s good that’s gone’. (V. iii. 55) Who is the ‘great sender’? King or God? Perhaps the lover is being imagined as carrying God’s royal and redemptive pardon to the loved one; and failure incurs wrath. As in the Final Plays, the human drama is regarded as sacramental. Much depends on our understanding of Helena as a channel, or medium, for the divine, or cosmic, powers. She is drawn directly as a medium, in contrast to Paulina whose function as miracle-worker is less realistically strutted. Like that


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of Cerimon, another such medium though a thumb-nail study only, Helena’s miraculous powers grow from, or through, her own, personal, qualities. They are one with her virgin ‘honour’, her calling as Diana’s ‘knight’ (I. iii. 122), her beyond-good-and-evil, Shakespearian and Nietzschean, insight, her purified and all-embracing love. Such are Shakespeare’s steps towards his conception of what might be termed a ‘Renaissance sainthood’. Sainthood cannot be fully explained; but each of us can, in his own way, use his own best gifts as an approach to an understanding, and Shakespeare seems to have done so here, using his own inward experience of love, the creative bisexuality, and the ranging poetry born from it, to conceive his Helena; using that wholeness of his own poetic experience for which Helena is, as we have seen, a voice. For poetry may be allowed to have functioned as his ‘third eye’, the expression of a unity beyond, and yet including, the male and female principles, a faculty of purity, perception, and power. We have from time to time referred to the Sonnets, and indeed there are many correspondences. All our emphasis on simple truth and integrity as against showiness; on the new generation out of touch with old pieties; both in detail and in general conception, and in the handling of values, much, except for the miracle, is sonnet-stuff. This does not mean that All’s Well that Ends Well was written at the same period, though there may have been some overlapping; what it does suggest is that the drama comes from the same intimate centre of the poet’s creating soul as do the Sonnets; and, that granted, we may regard the miracle as corresponding in some sense to the miracle of Shakespeare’s poetry. All miracles are the tapping of cosmic powers; and what else is the greatest poetry? In the Sonnets Shakespeare’s love becomes a vast conception over-arching world affairs: it is ‘hugely politic’, beyond all matters of ‘state’ (124); and when Shakespeare’s consciousness, clarified by love, is offered its vision of human splendour, he tells us with some pride how his ‘great mind most kingly drinks it up’ (114). So too Helena speaks of ‘imperial Love’ (II. iii. 81), and is herself given imperial comparison as ‘a maid too virtuous for the contempt of empire’ (III. ii. 33). We may say that Helena very closely corresponds to that in Shakespeare’s soul which loved the Fair Youth. And here we find another parallel. Bertram is not unlike that youth: both are handsome, noble, and in danger of being led astray by a false and decadent society. When Shakespeare complains ‘thou dost common grow’ (Sonnet 69) he is seeing his loved youth very much as Helena may be supposed to have seen Bertram. The young man in A Lover’s Complaint is a more satiric portrait than either, but much of the poem, written from a woman’s viewpoint, offers analogies to All’s Well that Ends Well (e.g. remembering Bertram’s wooing of Diana, 148–329; and see The Mutual Flame).


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We can accordingly understand why Shakespeare found himself able to pour so much of his most cherished feeling into the creation of Helena. And there is more to say. Helena’s miracle is not merely a miracle of healing; it is, pre-eminently, a healing of the King. Now, if we read ‘king’, as I have elsewhere read it in Hamlet’s ‘catch the conscience of the King’ (Hamlet, II. ii. 642; ‘Hamlet Reconsidered’, The Wheel of Fire, enlarged edn., p. 303), and as indeed it must be read throughout Shakespeare, as denoting the very soul of the body politic, we have an analogy to Shakespeare’s royalistic drama, so closely and continuously concerned with infusing health into his community. Great as is Helena’s ‘miracle’, Shakespeare had himself experienced the like, using the ‘third eye’ of poetry. Helena is advanced to social favour through her art, as was Shakespeare through his. Whether or not Shakespeare himself ever expected a return of love from his Fair Youth, or some other, as a result of his work, we cannot precisely say. It is, however, clear that in a general sense Shakespeare must have known what it was to value fame as a means to raising himself in the eyes of a loved one; and to that extent All’s Well that Ends Well may be called autobiographical.11 All this may appear trivial, and, whether true or not, unimportant. But it points on. For it helps us to see why such vast issues can be felt bulging through this at first sight unsatisfactory plot. What is our main opposition? A sharply personified condensation of an opposition insistent throughout Shakespeare’s work regularly concerned with the wrestling of male and female principles; here feminine love in virgin purity set against male values of prowess linked to sexual laxity. All Shakespeare’s women, bad or good, are conceived as units, but his men are divided; here the contrast is rendered explicit, is part of the dramatic thesis. Helena is a unit, Bertram in pieces. Helena has spiritual, Bertram merely human, worth; she preserves piety to the past, using her father’s legacy to noble effect, whereas he gives away his ancestral ring for a temporary infatuation. To risk, for the moment, a very rough simplification, we can say that she, under symbolic expansion, becomes—though this is not the whole truth of her—a representative of the medieval world, of Christian faith, and he of the new Renaissance, with no sure positive values but male honour on the field of battle, and with no sexual principles, or even understanding, since he can speak the most urgent love-poetry and repudiate it soon after. Of this contrast we find traces also in the contrast of Trojans and Greeks in Troilus and Cressida. The implications are vast: for this is the contrast of Church and State; more, of East and West, since Helena’s sanctity channels occult powers drawing our thoughts back to New Testament times, and earlier, and to be associated rather with the esoteric traditions of the East and the various spiritualistic movements of our own day than with the official learning, the scientific, or theological, learning, of the West.12 All this is implicit in our central passages contrasting Helena’s miraculous cure with the learning of the established schools (pp. 148, 150, 154 above).


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And yet, once again, Helena is not herself to be limited to one side of the opposition: she is, through love, inclusive. She stands at the very heart of that complex of which the Clown and Parolles are the two opposing extremes. She alone escapes the Clown’s condemnation and she alone refuses to condemn Parolles. Her life is bound by no doctrine, but is rather a way, a mode of being, expressing love and honour at their best. In her, life aspires to art, to poetry; and that is why her consciousness functions on the poetic level. One peculiarly interesting thought, to us of the twentieth century, may be drawn from the play: we watch the male, humanistic, values proving themselves only really positive in war, whereas the female, spiritualistic values have another office, healing; more, the healing of a sick king. We may again notice that Helena, like Christ himself, yields no whit to the soldier in point of initiative and courage: she voluntarily risks torture and death in the cause of love. Two last questions remain. One is this: if Helena be, as she seems, a creature of bisexual and virgin integration, how can she marry? Shakespeare met the difficulty, in part, by carrying on the emphasis on virginity and the goddess Dian into the affair with the girl Diana; and certainly in spirit Helena remains throughout Diana’s ‘knight’ (I. iii. 120). For the rest we may say that, though in our era men or women of perfected, or near-perfect, integration appear to be better without a sexual partner, yet perhaps a state may be reached where the virtues of virginity and of marriage are, as Helena as good as tells us they can be (p. 136), identified; and if so, it is this which Helena aims at. In her sanctity aspires to sexuality. True, it is hard to see Bertram as an apt partner, but this is an old story, and we feel the same about other of Shakespeare’s young heroes. Our second question is this: after reading the story of so masterful, yet humbly feminine, a woman, so busily, and even more convincingly than other Shakespearian heroines, putting male confusions in order, we may ask whether it points us to some new form of society where the female values will be in the ascendant? To that new ‘Aquarian age’ which esoteric thought today is never tired of prophesying, and to which the feminine insistencies of so much modern drama, of Shaw, O’Neill, and O’Casey point? Perhaps. If so, Helena’s assumption of the male prerogative of marriage-proposal, however strange to us it may be, makes perhaps a necessary emphasis, and one germane to the whole. To discuss such a society here, or even offer any suggestions as to its nature, would be beyond our purpose, though we may hazard the thought that the feminine, which includes the religious, spiritualistic, and poetic attributes, would assume greater prominence in the handling of affairs: a state we can, should we so choose, understand to be forecast by Byron’s ‘man-queen’ in Sardanapalus (I. i), and even feel to be darkly symbolized in the queenship of Shakespeare’s age, and of Pope’s and Tennyson’s, our three ages of poetic harmony; and in ours, too, for that matter, though the harmony eludes us.


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NOTES 1. The metallic part at the end of the scabbard. 2. Poetic sincerity may often in Shakespeare express weaknesses which are satirized in another’s prose, as happens with Orsino and Feste, Claudio and Beatrice, Jacques and Touchstone, Hotspur and Falstaff, Glendower and Hotspur, Othello and Iago, Lear and the Fool, Antony and Enobarbus. But the poetry nevertheless holds an emotional content which prose normally does not, and to undervalue the dignity of its speaker would be a folly reducing a complex antagonism to simple satire. Prose scores more heavily in the Comedies, poetry in the Tragedies. Our brief statement is necessarily crude: Shakespearian prose can be highly imaginative, and is so particularly in All’s Well that Ends Well. But, with this reservation, we might almost say that Shakespeare’s life-work, like Byron’s, could be defined as a wrestling of prose and poetry, with a victory, in the last plays, for the poetry. 3. Mr Paul N. Siegel has recently gone some way towards placing Cassio’s loose behaviour by observing its function within the web of Iago’s plot (Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise, New York, 1957). The point is worth making and can be accepted without subscribing to Mr Siegel’s argument concerning damnation. 4. In my discussion of the word ‘antique’ in the Sonnets (The Mutual Flame, pp. 82–5) I omitted to mention both the ‘antique token’ of Othello (V. ii. 214) and the ‘old and antique song’ in Twelfth Night (II, iv, 3). 5. I follow the Folio pointing in printing a colon here. 6. Helena’s virginity must be related to both (i) her love-insight and (ii) her subsequent function as miracle-worker. For (i) the revelationary properties of virginity, compare Mr John Cowper Powys’ words in The Brazen Head (1956): ‘that unique power of revelation, of illumination, of ultimate vision, that virgins alone possess’ (p. 207). For (ii) its specifically magical properties in action, see The Brazen Head, pp. 81–3; also pp. 267, 270–1, 337, 341; and for a reference to Christian myth and dogma, p. 290. See also Maiden Castle (1937), pp. 236, 240, 482–3; Jobber Skald, pp. 266, 276–7, 310; Dostoievsky, p. 48. 7. These are discussed in Christ and Nietzsche, p. 20. For Sonnets 113 and 114, see The Mutual Flame, pp. 119–21. 8. The ‘third eye’ is said to be situated between and above the two physical eyes. In ‘absent healing’ an image of the patient is focussed as the apex of a pyramid of which the three eyes are the base (Reality, Simcot Press, Blackpool; 3 July 1953): the triangular mechanism here indicated helps to explain Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘triple’, as at Antony and Cleopatra, I. i. 12. For the more general significances, see The Tibetan Book of the Dead, by W. Y. Evans-Wentz (2nd edn., 1949, p. 216); also The Finding of the Third Eye by Vera Stanley Alder (1938; last reprint, 1955), a neat introduction to many aspects of occult wisdom, containing some valuable remarks on bisexuality and the spiritualistic powers of sexual instinct (Ch. VI, ‘Male and Female’); Man: The Grand Symbol of the Mysteries, Manly Hall, 1932; Ch. XVI; and The Third Eye, T. Lobsang Rampa, 1956. 9. Precisely the same issue is today being fought out by that famous healer of the spiritualist movement, Mr Harry Edwards, and the British Medical Association. 10. This is an obvious example of a well-known, and sometimes disturbing, problem. There is a natural human tendency to expect such powers to work only


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through a person in high office, as in the old belief that English monarchs had the power of healing ‘the King’s evil’ (see Macbeth, IV. iii. 146–59); or to suppose that they should act best through a minister of the Church. But the powers concerned do not appear to recognize such limitations. There is, moreover, no suggestion in All’s Well that Ends Well, as there is in The Winter’s Tale, that the miracle may be by some regarded as the work of evil powers, of ‘black magic’: the issue is left simply as one between human learning and the invasion of the greater powers. 11. For my earlier remarks on the autobiographical element in All’s Well that Ends Well, see ‘The Shakespearian Integrity’, p. 219 below; also Christ and Nietzsche, pp. 123–4. 12. A similar contrast is developed in my article ‘The Scholar Gipsy: an Interpretation’; The Review of English Studies, Jan. 1955.

QQQ 1994—Mary Free. From Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s Plays Free teaches at Florida International University. In this essay, “All’s Well That Ends Well as Noncomic Comedy,” Free’s analysis of the structure of the play and the relationships among its characters is illuminating. At the center of her essay are issues of power and subversion, a careful evaluation of how Helena transcends traditional power systems and structures. For Free, the primary source of generic instability in the play, the thing that disrupts the play’s comic movement, is Helena’s violation of social norms and linguistic domination of the systems that enforce those norms.

The title of All’s Well That Ends Well suggests potential for mistaken identity, intrigue plot, thwarted romance—the stuff that makes comedy and the comic— and in its way the play fulfills those potentials. All does end well at least in the sense that girl does get boy despite all obstacles.1 In gross structure and plot, All’s Well That Ends Well also conforms to comedy’s basic outlines as they appear in other Shakespearean plays. Bertram’s flight from authority figures—King, Countess, Helena—and their rules and dictates to pursue the Florentine wars echoes flight to the saturnalian green world. His abandoning the woman he scorns along with his later pursuit of one who scorns him has precedent in both The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Proteus and Demetrius forswear their former vows (“In number more than ever women spoke” as Hermia prophetically reminds us, 1.1.176)2 to woo Silvia and Hermia respectively. Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a worthy predecessor to Diana in All’s Well That Ends Well; the dogged devotion that Julia (The Two


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Gentlemen of Verona), Hermia (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and Helena (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) display toward the sometimes unworthy objects of their adoration anticipates Helena’s in All’s Well That Ends Well. This late play’s conclusion also fits the comedic prototype by bringing together those admired with those shamed; everyone reenters the community—even Parolles with his “scurvy” curtsies—which creates “a movement towards harmony, reconciliation, happiness: the medieval idea” (Nelson 1990, 2). These conformities to formulae notwithstanding, All’s Well That Ends Well provides less pleasure, amusement, or even laughter than either the relatively weak The Two Gentlemen of Verona or the comedically superior A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Throughout All’s Well That Ends Well ’s progress we, as theatergoers or critics, become aware—to our growing discomfort—that “ending well” does not in and of itself guarantee the presence of the comic within comedy. Two factors help to hold the comic at bay in this play: first, the placement and use of marriage as an expression of power; and second, the metalanguage of power that distinguishes the marked hierarchies of noble/commoner, public/domestic, and maturity/foolishness that the play presents.

Marriage as an Expression of Power Marriage is a central element in the construct of Renaissance comedy. In the Shakespearean canon, a number of the comedies include marriages, placing them (or implying that they impend) close to or at the plays’ ends as a reaffirmation, restoration and promise for the continuation of society.3 Other comedies deal with married women as in The Comedy of Errors and The Merry Wives of Windsor; or they move the marriage forward, thus foregrounding it and making it precipitate further action in the main plot as in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing. What makes All’s Well That Ends Well’s foregrounded marriage unique is the undeniable fact that Bertram does not want Helena regardless of how much she wants him or how much the members of the nobility—most notably the King, the Countess, and Lafew—want him to want her. Further, in its institution, its mixing of high personages with low, and the alliances between social groups, the foregrounded marriage in All’s Well That Ends Well subverts the comic by creating discomfiting inversions in the play’s social spheres. While the concept of marriage as regenerative force via Helena’s pregnancy obtains in principle at the end, when the “broken nuptial” comes together,4 no wonder we, along with the King in the epilogue, feel little if any delight: things but “seem” well; we have no guarantees. We cannot be certain even there that Bertram truly wants her. A distinction that contributes to my thesis is that All’s Well That Ends Well stands apart from the Shakespearean comedic mainstream in that Helena and Bertram, however estranged their relationship, remain the single couple in the


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play.5 Elsewhere Shakespeare provides us with sets of couples: twins who marry and woo in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, two men in pursuit of one woman in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, two married women who plot to outwit one man and teach another a lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Rosalind and Celia with their loves in As You Like It, and a triad of lovers in The Merchant of Venice. Even Measure for Measure, the play most often closely linked to Alt’s Well That Ends Well, provides us pairings. All’s Well That Ends Well gives us two widows, a virgin, and a wife in name only. While all these pairings deal with power in relationships, they do not constitute the exact marked hierarchies of power that All’s Well That Ends Well presents to us. The foregrounded marriage in All’s Well That Ends Well differs from those in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing in origination and ordination. While Kate in The Taming of the Shew has no more choice than does Bertram about whom each marries (Baptista and Petruchio merely strike a bargain as do the King and Helena), Petruchio and Kate as a pair remain this play’s focal point. We observe the battle of wit and will between them, and the entire fourth act centers on them. Whether we grant or disallow the concept of mutuality of consent,6 whether the production relies on Zefferellian horseplay or a more restrained production concept, The Taming of the Shrew provokes laughter7—the sine qua non of the comic—because of the physical and verbal interaction between the principal characters. The same holds true for Much Ado about Nothing. Like Kate and Petruchio, Beatrice and Benedick command our attention, their wit and wordplay amuse and distract us, and they are more interesting to us than the play’s other couple Claudio and Hero. Even in that relationship, the comedy of Much Ado about Nothing remains more comic than does All’s Well That Ends Well. Claudio and Hero agree to marry, an important distinction between their relationship and that of Helena and Bertram. The distasteful circumstances of the broken nuptial notwithstanding,8 the separation between Claudio and Hero fails to disrupt wholly the play’s overall comic spirit for two reasons: first, we know Dogberry and the Watch hold the key to reconciliation; second, as well as more important, the comic Beatrice and Benedick remain our primary focal point. Helena and Bertram appear on stage together in but five scenes. Their exchanges generally indicate the dynamic of power in their relationship as Helena oozes subservience to her lord and master, while Bertram, until the final scene, plays his superiority, both of class and gender, for all it’s worth. In three scenes where they appear together, they speak to or about one another but engage in no dialogue. In 1.1 Bertram in one and a half lines commands that Helena, “Be comfortable to my mother, your mistress, / And make much of her” (76–77). In 2.3 she subserviently offers herself to him in two and a half lines:


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I dare not say I take you, but I give Me and my service, ever whilst I live, Into your guiding power (2.3.102–104) The remainder of this scene has them each talking to the King, but not to one another. In a third scene (3.5), Helena merely views Bertram from a distance as the army passes and asks about him. Only two scenes have them exchanging dialogue. In 2.5, comprising thirty-five lines, Bertram, without having consummated the marriage and refusing Helena’s modest request for a departing kiss, dismisses his bride by sending her back to Rossillion. His language is primarily in the command form, hers acquiescent. She comes “as [she] was commanded from [him]” (2.5.54). She declares herself Bertram’s “most obedient servant” in a scene that allows for no possible irony (2.5.72). Even when she musters the courage to hint at a parting kiss, she hesitates and stumbles as a young woman very much in love and unsure of herself. In 5.3, the reconciliation, they exchange two lines each, and arguably Bertram’s “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly I I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” is addressed more to the King than to Helena. These two encounters comprise but thirty-nine lines all told. All’s Well That Ends Well remains a comedy in structure, yet Helena’s agency in the enforced marriage, as well as the subsequent separation and ploys, distances us from the comic. Other elements distance us as well. When the Countess learns that Helena loves Bertram, we have the perfect occasion for a traditional blocking figure, but no. The Countess not only enjoys, but also encourages Helena in her aspirations. No witty bantering about sex, love, fidelity in wedlock—that which might create the comic within the matrix of comedy—takes place between Helena and Bertram, the play’s only couple. Certainly some comic playfulness occurs within the play. No one will deny its presence in the virginity dialogue between Helena and Parolles, nor in the choosing scene as Helena walks from budding youth to budding youth before “giving” herself to Bertram, nor in Parolles’s humiliation. Nevertheless, what lightness exists remains apart from the focal couple. Of added significance is how little of the playfulness associated with earlier comedies takes place among the women. Beyond the Countess’s hope for Helena’s love, her brief acknowledgement of her own past, and her teasing in the “I say I am your mother” dialogue (1.3), women’s dialogue as they assess man’s fecklessness has a more brittle edge than do similar assessments given in the earlier comedies. Helena’s actions set her apart from her Shakespearean sisters. Other independently-acting heroines—Viola, Rosalind, Portia—play at their lovegames and are, in some cases, willing to leave Time to fadge things out. They


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also employ masculine disguise to effect the amount of control or empowerment they enjoy. Helena does what she does without disguise. In some respects Helena and Portia are the most closely akin. Portia is willing to comply with her father’s will; Helena is willing to submit herself to Bertram’s.9 Both work purposefully to achieve their goals. However close that kinship, differences obtain. Allies from the play’s outset, Portia and Nerissa plot to test true love’s faith; Helena, who must create her allies, has yet to gain mere acceptance as wife. To achieve her goals, she acts with what Western culture sees as male prerogatives. As A. P. Riemer has said, she acts with a “male purposefulness” (Riemer 1975–76, 54). In order for her to succeed undisguised, she must perform these actions in a way that the empowering male structure (i.e., the King and Lafew as members of the ancien régime) fails to recognize as violating sex or class differences. In All’s Well That Ends Well Helena follows Bertram to Paris. There she originates the marriage by striking a bargain with the King and curing him. Unlike the other pairings and marriages in the comedies, however, no tacit nor overt mutuality exists between this nuptial pair. Here the King must ordain an enforced marriage of his ward Bertram to comply with the terms of the bargain. Such ordination violates the usual circumstances that we find in the festive comedies.10 In those comedies, ordination, directed against a woman, may initiate the flight from authority into the saturnalian world of comic license. Bertram’s response to the King’s command is like that of Silvia or Hermia: forced into marriage ordained against his will, a marriage that is originated by a spouse who is not loved, he runs away, as do the heroines. Bertram’s running away to Florence offers a different kind of escape from that of the heroines. Not only is his escape to a city but to one associated with sexual licentiousness. The King himself warns his courtiers against “Those girls of Italy.” When Helena discovers Bertram in Florence,11 she entraps him by means of the bed trick, which inverts predicated male-female sex roles just as “girl gets boy” inverts what we would recognize as the clichéd phrasing. Her action substitutes the legal for the licentious. Helena entraps Bertram a second time as well in 5.3 by her further employment of Diana before the King. Even the King becomes confused as Helena employs her skills. What allows everyone to escape prison is Helena’s ability to use the language of empowerment without disturbing the status quo.

Metalanguage of Power Since Renaissance cultural and sexual politics determine that only males have the possibility of an unbounded (or “unmarked”) scope of action, Helena’s behavior—both her actions and linguistic powers—marks her. Marking is a means of classifying, of categorizing differences that exist within orders. To be marked is normally negative because a marked group is set apart to be evaluated on a special scale, one generally lower than the universal scale of the unmarked


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whole. Hence critical study often uses a lesser scale to evaluate minority authors or marginalized works (such as the problem comedies).12 The group that is unmarked thus controls the discourse used to evaluate; that group establishes the hierarchical ranking. To reproduce a marking system is to reproduce a form of hierarchy under the guise of “natural” reality. Significantly, to maintain a classification scheme, we learn to believe that principles of difference are natural principles inherent in given structures. This naturalization is a social process effected by a particular discourse that reproduces structures in a consistent manner. When something violates these classificatory principles, it disconcerts. As a problem comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well provides a case in point. Comedy by its classification should be comic. When it’s not, we begin marking it, setting it off from its parent class. As we do so, we find ourselves referring to an anomalous work negatively and mask, or “background,” its historical provenance, making the work lie beyond normal reflection.13 Hence what doesn’t fit takes precedence over what does. But understanding the process does more than just clarify how the work is marked vis-à-vis the canon. That understanding also offers a way of accounting for what happens within the play. All’s Well That Ends Well works on three pairs of well-known marking distinctions. First, writers from Engels on have stressed the importance of the distinction between the domestic sphere of marriage and family, the main arena of women (and the structural principle of comedy), and the public sphere dominated by males (the world of tragedy). The public sphere activities of production are the activities that maintain social institutions defined as important by leaders and politicians—“to busy giddy minds with foreign wars,” and by merchants and businessmen—to have “argosies [that] overpeer the petty traffickers.” At the same time they appear routine and relatively empty of interesting human drama, save when they become disrupted by such male passions as revenge (Hamlet), ambition (Macbeth), and violence (Coriolanus), when they become the stuff of tragedy. The activities of reproduction in the domestic sphere are always marked by human drama even if often trivial drama. To oversimplify, in the domestic sphere the “image” of public legitimacy does not have to be maintained, so the discordant details of human relations can be revealed. From Shakespearean comedy to modern sitcom, the domestic sphere and its activities, because they are marked, are routinely more entertaining, even comic, than public activities, but they are also less “real,” less significant in their impact than the activities of the male-dominated sphere. The extra information that makes domestic activities more interesting also assures us that they are in the less important domestic sphere. In All’s Well That Ends Well the major concerns are about the domestic institutions of marriage and sex; public institutions of power and war are in the background. Second, in All’s Well That Ends Well the characters divide into fools— Bertram, Parolles, Lavatch—and sincere, mature people—the King, Lafew, and


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all of the female characters. The marking of fools is analogous to the marking of the domestic sphere in that the fools are more interesting (or perhaps irritating is a better choice of word in Bertram’s case), but are less involved in important things. The Florentine wars as war, after all, figure little in the plot, and Parolles’s loss of the drum parodies heroic action. Because most of the play’s fools are male and most of the sincere, mature people are female, the things attended to by the serious people are things of importance to women, in this case, principally marriage. Significantly, this fact places the King as an ally with the women in their concern for marriage, a fact especially crucial in understanding the King’s decision to help Diana to a husband at the play’s end. Despite the Renaissance prohibition that comedy should not mix King with commoner, this alliance not only establishes the play as comedy, it reinforces the King’s role as “father” (with its implications for marital status) and the dominant patriarchal figure in society—a role Bertram must also learn to play in order for society to work. Third, the characters are divided into nobility versus commoners. The latter group includes Helena and Parolles along with Diana and the Widow. In All’s Well That Ends Well noble/common fits the same unmarked/marked pattern as the other two distinctions (i.e., public/domestic, mature/fool). The Widow alludes to having lost a former higher status and states her aspirations for Diana. Helena’s common birth makes her love for Bertram appear hopeless, something she strives to overcome. Both Helena and Parolles seek to climb the social ladder, yet nothing in the text supports a reading of her as mere social climber. She is no would-be Count Malvolio. Parolles, by way of contrast, is the play’s true social climber who gets his just deserts in public humiliation. Helena is marked because the normal marriage arrangements among the nobly born, public spectacles and often dynastic alliances, are unavailable to her. Thus, she must undertake a series of interesting but unusual activities (travel, linguistic magic, the bed trick) if she is to gain the ceremony of formal marriage, which in turn posits comedy, and the domestic intimacy of consummation, which in the play’s inverted sexual manipulation denies the comic. Helena’s decision to leave Rossillion to go to Paris and her later decision to become Saint Jaques’s pilgrim indicate her independence and self-reliance. Those attributes do not guarantee her success. To achieve her goals, she must insinuate herself into the world of power, the world of the nobility that figures so importantly in this play. Her means is linguistic. (Arguably that linguistic skill in the sense of language of power is part of the legacy her father has left her and facilitates her success with the King.) Other heroines control language as game, as play; Helena does not often play at comic wit. She dominates Parolles in the dialogue on virginity; she wins the Countess’s favor and the King’s trust on the basis of language. As the play builds her power in allying her with the King, so


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Helena uses that power in allying Diana and the Widow with herself. At the same time that the play allows Helena power via language, Helena’s professed view of herself calls attention to her subordinate position in the domestic sphere. As Joan Larsen Klein argues for Lady Macbeth as a good housewife, so could we for Helena in her desire to wed, bed, produce offspring, and be subservient to her lord.14 Unlike Lady Macbeth, Helena becomes the embodiment of power via her pregnancy. Helena’s skill in language will not work with Bertram, however, because he fails to understand it, as his alliance with Parolles suggests. Parolles also attempts to violate the noble/commoner distinction but fails. His attempts to move into the public world end in cowardice and shame, for Parolles lacks the linguistic superiority associated with other Shakespearean rogues. The ultimate irony of the unmasking scene lies, I believe, in the language of command the lords choose: doubletalk. Unlike Helena and the King, Parolles—despite his name—never controls language and, therefore, remains powerless: a victim easily undone by a plot concocted by those who do control the language of power. His final line, “I will not speak what I know,” underscores that powerlessness. In contrast, however much humiliation Falstaff suffers at the Windsorites’ hands, he maintains his comic dignity by recognizing his folly. Lafew may take Parolles home to sport, but the latter’s curtsies remain “scurvy ones.” While the unmasking action comprising Parolles’s comeuppance is the most comic in the entire play, it remains unsuccessful because he has never mastered the original linguistic game and because it profits nothing for Bertram. Bertram must undergo his own linguistic education before an even higher court. The (mis)alliance between Bertram and Parolles differs from earlier dramatic models. The play never convincingly shows Parolles misleading Bertram in the classic morality or prodigal son format. Were he to do so, the action would empower him. Instead Parolles tends to parrot Bertram’s views. Parolles as parrot helps to point out that Bertram doesn’t know how to control language either. Bertram offers clichés or denies the significance of the language of power when the King says that “I can create the rest” referring to his ability to bestow a title on Helena (2.3.143). Such a failure suggests an inability to understand the larger game wherein the words signify, a failure potentially far more dangerous than the Florentine wars. Because of that lack of knowledge, Bertram mistakenly chooses commoner—in his alliance with Parolles, or his haste to the Florentine wars—an inversion that cannot obtain ultimately in the world of comedy. Only through his humiliation, as he is caught in a linguistic trap of Helena’s devising, can Bertram fulfill the comedic formula of reconciliation. Although Diana speaks the riddling verse, Helena originates it, and it bears similarity to her incantatory charming of the King. Helena’s inventions work, but Bertram’s fail. While the aspirations for Helena, Parolles, and Bertram differ in degree, these


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inversions, given the construct of this play, strike the audience as illegitimate and unpleasantly manipulative be they male or female. As such the inversions violate and deny the comic. It might appear that the dramatic structure of All’s Well That Ends Well would be a parallelism of these three distinctions: public/domestic, mature/fool, and noble/commoner. But what is dramatic about the play is its inversion of public/ domestic and mature/fool. This inversion takes place because the power of the king/subject distinction supplants that of the more generic noble/commoner one. The King can write new rules for the game. He can alter the standards at will to ordain the marriage of his unwilling ward, raise Helena in status, condemn and forgive both Diana and Bertram, promise yet another female commoner one of “This youthful parcel / Of noble bachelors [who] stand at [his] bestowing” (2.3.52–53). The language of power is almost always unobtainable for those in the marked class because the holders of power can change the language at will, thus changing the rules. Helena is an exception. The play still fundamentally does not oppose male hegemony and the marked nature of the domestic sphere, however. What Helena wants—along with her Shakespearean sisters—is marriage (that she actually wants Bertram remains a disappointing reality for most of us). She wins in the end through her use of intelligence and through the inversion that places her in the serious moral and linguistically-sophisticated sphere and Bertram in the arena of the foolish and verbally inadequate. But the inversion takes place initially because Helena cures the King. From then on the King, the ultimate symbol of male controlling power, is on her side. What the play’s end restores is marriage and the domestic sphere “the way it should be” in a comedy. Viewed dialectically, both the King and Helena have different roles from the other characters in the play. For the others, distinctions such as male/female, noble/commoner are givens (preattentive distinctions); they assume that these distinctions are normal and thus cannot manipulate them or even understand why they are so. The King, on the other hand, understands and can manipulate the metalanguage of power. After Helena cures him, the King cancels for her not only the effect of commoner birth, but also female lack of power in the prerogative of marriage choice by means of the foregrounded and ordained marriage. Helena does not have the King’s power, but she does have (perhaps) an even greater understanding of the metalanguage. What she understands is that when a woman can mobilize the solidarity of other women, as she does with the Countess, Diana, and the Widow, she can succeed—if the males do not notice any sex or class differences being violated; hence Helena’s acquiescing to a subservient role. It is thus fitting that Bertram is such a weak character; in the dialectic of the play the King is Helena’s true partner. And it is no wonder that he, along with us, is left trying to puzzle this comedy out in the Epilogue.


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NOTES 1. The fact that “girl gets boy” reverses the usual phrasing. What that reversal encompasses in the play’s action helps to contribute to the noncomic atmosphere in All’s Well That Ends Well, a point I take up later in the body of the essay. 2. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare. 3. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, or C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy for extended consideration of the function of marriage in comedy. 4. The phrase is from Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) and Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 5. Robert Ornstein comments on the implications of this feature, which Shakespeare appropriated from his source, Boccaccio’s tale of Giletta and Beltramo; see his Shakespeare’s Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 173–78. 6. I agree with Irene Dash that while the play “throws both ideas [forced marriage vs. ‘good consent’] out to the audience . . . the comedy offers a remarkably mature affirmation of the potential for understanding between a man and a woman” (Dash 1981, 35, 64). The Taming of the Shrew’s plot contains that potential, while All’s Well That Ends Well ends with a series of conditional “ifs” and “seems.” 7. Notable exceptions are Charles Marowitz’s 1975 adaptation and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1978 production; cf. David Bevington, “The Taming of the Shrew in Performance,” in Shakespeare: Four Comedies (New York: Bantam, 1988), 12. 8. Certainly one could argue that Claudio and Bertram are close kin in rejecting their brides. Claudio’s accusation, however, breaks that nuptial before the ceremony is complete. Bertram must perforce go through the rite. He then vows not to consummate the marriage, which means it will remain a marriage in name only until Helena can meet his demands. Furthermore, in Much Ado about Nothing Hero remains offstage until the reconciliation while we must attend to Helena’s actions in All’s Well That Ends Well. 9. The question of Portia’s and Helena’s “submission” is beyond the focus of this study. Richard A. Levin’s recent Love and Society In Shakespearean Comedy (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985) examines Portia’s motivations while Bertrand Evans’s Shakespeare’s Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960) and Howard C. Cole’s The “All’s Well” Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981) remain classic statements on Helena’s assertive behavior. 10. For the way in which enforced marriage of a ward violates the guardian’s responsibilities, see the discussion of All’s Well That Ends Well in Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare’s Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 59–64, or the analysis of what such considerations meant to women in Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 79–85. 11. I am not concerned here whether her arrival is by plan or happenstance. 12. Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983) is relevant here. 13. My discussion is grounded in the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor, 1967).


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14. See Joan Larsen Klein, “Lady Macbeth: ‘Infirm of Purpose,’” in Carolyn Lenz, et al., eds., The Woman’s Part (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 240–255.

QQQ 1997—David McCandless. From Gender and Performance in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies McCandless, who has worked both as a scholar and as a director, formerly taught drama at the University of California at Berkeley. His analysis of gender roles in the work, of Helena’s sexual play and Bertram’s desire for masculine independence, is among the best criticism of All’s Well That Ends Well of its time. In the last section of McCandless’s work excerpted here, he ruminates on the power of the usually unperformed bed-trick scene and contemplates the effects of staging it.

The starting point for my discussion is Susan Snyder’s recent characterization of All’s Well as a “deconstructed fairy tale”:1 lurking beneath the folkloric narrative of the poor physician’s daughter who deploys magic and cunning in order to overcome a dashing Count’s disdainful resistance are the unrepresentable spectres of female sexual desire and male sexual dread. Indeed, the play invests the fairy tale motifs that W. W. Lawrence believes undergird All’s Well—“The Healing of the King” and “The Fulfillment of the Tasks”—with potent erotic subtexts.2 In adapting “The Healing of the King,” Shakespeare, like his model Boccaccio, departs from tradition in making the King’s healer a woman. Lawrence barely mentions this innovation, but it seems highly significant, especially since Shakespeare, unlike Boccaccio, makes Helena’s gender—more particularly, her sexual ardor and allure—indispensable to the cure. Integral to the narrative of “The Fulfillment of the Tasks” is the bed-trick, an explicitly sexual event in which a disprized wife wins back her husband by making love to him incognito, taking the place of another woman (in some versions the wife herself in disguise) whom he has wooed. All’s Well deconstructs this folkloric device by wedding it to genuine sexual perturbation. The bed-trick is not simply the consummation of a marriage, in which Helena cleverly satisfies Bertram’s seemingly impossible conditions, but an act of prostitution, in which Helena services Bertram’s lust and submits to humiliating anonymous “use,” and a kind of rape, in which Helena coerces Bertram into having sex with her against his will. Yet, as many critics have noted, the play seems to suppress its own erotic subdrama.3 Certainly Shakespeare idealizes and mystifies the sexual arousal that empowers Helena’s cure of the King. He lends Helena magical and hieratic


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powers, giving her the capacity to effect a supernatural cure. He similarly desexualizes her erotic agency in the bed-trick, allowing Diana to serve as Helena’s sexualized double. Diana also suffers Bertram’s degrading slander in the play’s final scene, allowing Helena to reenter the play as a saintly, resurrected figure whose visible pregnancy sanctifies her sexuality and who elicits an instantaneous reformation from Bertram. The bed-trick becomes a transcendent event, vastly removed from groping bodies in the dark, from the kind of event imaged as “defil[ing] the pitchy night” (4.4.24).4 I propose in this piece to stage the play’s erotic subdrama, to push it further to the surface, for the purposes of tracing the play’s provocative interrogation of gender. Helena and Bertram are both inextricably entangled in gender’s constrictive myths. Helena performs and seeks to reify a normative femininity that her aggressive desire contradicts, while Bertram enacts a normative masculinity that his model, the meretricious Parolles, radically destabilizes. The reading I wish to stage adumbrates a theatrical staging that I will extend by citing and imagining corroborative directorial choices. I will consider, in particular, how the circulation of the look reinforces or disrupts gender roles. My investigation of performance will focus most heavily on the implications of performing the unperformed bed-trick. In performance, the bed-trick constitutes a “lack” in the play’s narrative because it is unperformed, not part of the play’s visceral, theatrical life, a plot mechanism scarcely capable of disconcerting spectators to the degree that it has critics. I want to examine the extent to which staging the bed-trick can assist in dramatizing the “deconstructed fairy tale” that lies at the heart of All’s Well—can assist, that is, in bringing to the surface the erotic subdrama that the play represses, and, in so doing, deepen the play’s deconstruction of gender. Indeed, a staged bed-trick demystifies and substantiates a female sexuality that the play elsewhere mystifies and evades, and thus begins to redress the “lack” not only in the play’s performed life but in a representational economy in which woman figures only as absence.

Helena’s Femininity: Subject vs. Object Helena has been such a puzzle and provocation to critics because she occupies the “masculine” position of desiring subject, even as she apologizes fulsomely for her unfeminine forwardness and works desperately to situate herself within the “feminine” position of desired object.5 At the same time, Bertram poses problems because he occupies the “feminine” space of the objectified Other, even as he struggles to define himself as a man by becoming a military and sexual conqueror. He is the desired object, the end of the hero’s (or, in this case, heroine’s) gendered journey of self-fulfillment. Helena’s opening soliloquy conveys the plight of a woman trapped between active (“masculine”) and passive (“feminine”) modes of desire. She clearly


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expresses her desire to consummate a sexual love, calling herself a “hind” who wishes to be “mated by the lion” (1.1.85–92). At the same time, she adopts a “feminine” posture: she cannot mate but only be “mated.” Furthermore, as a hind desiring a lion, she cannot mate at all. Helena thus naturalizes the culturally established distinctions of gender and class that make Bertram a forbidden object. In addition, Helena trains a desiring look on Bertram, submitting her “curled darling” to rapturous objectification, only to affirm a “feminine” helplessness, lamenting the impossibility of eliciting his returned look.6 ’Twas pretty though a plague, To see him every hour, to sit and draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls, In our heart’s table—heart too capable Of every line and trick of his sweet favour. (1.1.92–96) Her look manifests lack and insufficiency, conveying a masochistic fixation: it was pleasurable torment—“pretty though a plague”—to survey his beauteous, unattainable form “every hour” (1.1.79–98). Once galvanized by Parolles’ bracing anti-virginity jape, however, Helena resolves to “feed” her desirous look, to make the object of worship an object of consumption: What power is it which mounts my love so high, That makes me see and cannot feed mine eye? The mightiest space in fortune nature brings To join like likes, and kiss like native things. (1.1.220–23) That Helena imagines a sexual feeding here seems plausible, given the imagery of “joining” and “kissing,” not to mention the suggestive phraseology of “mount[ing] my love.” The “space” separating her and Bertram she portrays as a product not of nature, which favors their “joining,” but of “fortune,” which seems here to mean “standing in life” (OED 5) and thus to represent culture. The language Helena employs is characteristically elliptical, stemming from her guarded, coded, sexually charged dialogue with Parolles. The obscurity of her discourse perhaps reflects the unspeakability of her desire. Her exchange with Parolles begins as a theatrical “turn,” with Helena playing “straight man” for the swaggering poseur. As straight man, Helena translates her unspeakable desire into the discourse of male bawdry, seeking a kind of release through the sublimated pleasures of naughty talk, even if her lines serve principally as cues for Parolles’ ribaldry.


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Helena’s salacious banter with Parolles marks her first explicit deviation from normative femininity, marks her as provocatively “open” in a social spectacle that, in Shakespeare’s time, demanded female “closedness.”7 Lisa Jardine asserts that Helena reveals herself as “too [sexually] knowing for the innocent virgin she professes to be.”8 Yet Helena does not profess to be anything at all in the play’s opening scene. Rather, she challenges the spectator’s attempt to hold her to a stable identity. She appears a grieving daughter, reveals herself a despairing lover, and finally emerges a resolute wooer, signaling a subjectivity that eludes a coherent singleness. Certainly Parolles regards Helena as sexually knowing and therefore “open” to ravishment. Performance could make clear that Parolles not only jests with Helena but cheekily flirts with her, launching, behind the cover of licentious badinage, an assault against her own virginity. The two of them may actually engage in some version of the erotic combat they describe: Helena “blows up” (arouses) Parolles, and Parolles seeks an opportunity to “blow up” Helena (make her pregnant). Although Parolles casts Helena as desired object, she maintains her status as desiring subject, rejecting subjection to his controlling look. Her objection to his greeting—“save you, fair queen” (106)—registers a protest against being treated like a “quean.” She claims the right to control her own sexual destiny, resisting Parolles’ injunction to “answer the time of request,” and thus rejecting the notion that a woman must not exercise choice but must make herself the object of a man’s. If Helena initially agrees to play the role of imperiled virgin, she ends the scene by emasculating Parolles, not simply by declining to gratify his desire but by mocking his cowardice and thereby undermining his masculine honor, provoking his retributive threat to return in order to “naturalize” (i.e., debauch) Helena. Helena’s query, “how might one do, sir, to lose [virginity] to her own liking?” (150–51) conveys something more than a rebuff of Parolles’ lecherous overtures. By invoking the possibility of fulfilling her own desire, Helena begins to take seriously Parolles’ aspersion of virginity—or, more specifically, his vision of the naturalness and regenerativeness of sexuality. She steps outside the scene’s theatrical frame and trades the role of “straight man” for that of surprised convert. She disregards his censure of her wish to choose rather than be chosen and answers his challenge, “will you anything with it?” decisively if obscurely: Not my virginity yet: There shall your master have a thousand loves, A mother, and a mistress, and a friend, A phoenix, captain, and an enemy, A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign, A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear. His humble ambition, proud humility;


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His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet; His faith, his sweet disaster; with a world Of pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms That blinking cupid gossips. (165–75) Modern editors have been inclined to assume a missing line between Helena’s terse defense of virginity and her expansive list of lovers’ endearments. “There” is usually taken to mean “at the court,” and the speech is explained as Helena’s anxious contemplation of courtly rivals whose enchantments may well stir Bertram’s desire. The speech might be better understood, however, as a coded disclosure of Helena’s own erotic stirrings. Her need to speak cryptically and elliptically not only betrays a compulsion to conceal her sexual passion but also reflects the difficulty of representing female sexuality within an oedipal plot that typically idealizes or erases it. If one gives up the idea of a missing line, the sense of Helena’s response is captured in G. Wilson Knight’s paraphrase, “I shall not part with my virginity to anyone yet, because therein your master has an infinite love.”9 Knight, however, backs away from the aggressively sexual connotations of this decoding, asserting, “I do not think, at this early stage in her story, it can mean ‘in giving your master my virginity I shall give him a thousand loves,’ since she has no good reason at this stage to expect such an event.”10 Helena’s lacking a reason to expect “such an event” is surely beside the point; she clearly desires to “mate” with Bertram and, stoked by Parolles’ libidinous exhortations, she presumably builds on the tantalizing possibility of losing her virginity to her own liking—that is, to Bertram. The speech becomes the link between this heretofore unthinkable idea and the conception of her bold plan for winning him. She wishes Bertram well, she tells Parolles, but would rather do him well— ”show what we alone must think.” She would like to give her well-wishing (that is, her love) a “body” which “might be felt” (180–81). Her wish that Bertram feel the body of her love foreshadows the offering of her body in the bed-trick and in marriage. Perhaps “at the court” has seemed the best candidate for Helena’s imagined “there” because virginity—or rather the unpenetrated female territory it predicates—has been perceived, within a phallocentric register of meaning, not as a “there” but as a “nowhere,” a “nothing-to-be-seen” in Irigaray’s striking phrase.11 In a Shakespearean sense, the virgin “knot” connotes a “not.”12 Thus the key to the speech may lie not in a missing line but in a missing language—one that embodies a woman’s “thereness” and enables the expression of female desire. Helena appears trapped within the phallocentric linguistic system that Lacan describes, in which female desire is literally unspeakable, always already reconfigured as the desire for male desire.13 The unspeakability of Helena’s passion compels her to speak it evasively and mystically. She thus characterizes her “virginity” as a kind of philosopher’s stone (5.3.102), a “tinct


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and multiplying medicine” that blesses Bertram with a supernally expansive love and allows her, for his sake, to assume all the guises of the courtier’s beloved—to become a kind of shape-shifting superwoman. “I am his anything,” Helena seems to say, as though embracing the status of possession that Petruchio prescribes for Kate when he calls her “my any thing” (3.2.332). In addition, Helena continues to believe that she must be “mated”: she cannot unleash this mystical female power, cannot become Bertram’s idealized courtly lover, until Bertram “has” her maidenhead, discovers her wonders “there.” Bertram will, in effect, give birth to her as a woman, becoming the fount of signification, a father as well as husband, confirming a transference implied in Helena’s earlier assertion that his image had supplanted her father’s (79–83). Once more the play seems to dramatize the contradiction of female subjectivity: Helena expresses an active (“masculine”) longing to consummate her passion but in terms that betray a “feminine” urge to empower and sustain Bertram, to fit herself to his fantasies—or at least to his received images of femininity. Helena’s feminine hope that Bertram might love her once he knows her (sexually) eventually impels her “masculine” orchestration of the bed-trick. Helena continues to feminize her desire throughout her campaign to win Bertram, offering compensatory performances of exemplary chastity to atone for the unchaste boldness of her plan.14 Her urge to simulate a normative femininity furthers an oedipal narrative that depends upon muting her sexual provocation. Forced by the Countess to confess her love for Bertram, Helena disclaims the desire to win him that we know she harbors, reviving the selfabasing hopelessness of her first soliloquy, once more portraying Bertram as an unattainable heavenly body that she worships (1.3.204–207). In a conversation with the King, she betrays a similar compulsion to appear normatively chaste. After Lafew does his best to mark their meeting as a sexual tryst, Helena precipitously withdraws her suit when the King taints her proffered cure with imputations of prostitution, “humbly entreat[ing]” a “modest thought”—requesting his belief in her chastity—as she prepares to take her leave (2.1.127–28). Her willingness to suffer a prostitute’s punishment if her cure fails (2.1.170–73) seems designed to dispel any lingering suspicions of unchastity, to distance her holy magic from wanton witchery.15 In 2.3, the scene in which Helena is to choose a husband, her status as desiring subject becomes public. The King, submitting a batch of eligible wards for her inspection, formally confers “looking power” upon her: “fair maid, send forth thine eye. . . . peruse them well” (52, 61). He also lends her the masculine privilege of choice: “Thou hast power to choose, and they none to forsake” (56). Her public position as dominant woman is so unprecedented that Lafew mistakenly believes that the young lords have rejected her rather than vice versa: as a woman, she cannot be the chooser but only the object of choice.16 Helena’s singular ascent requires another compensatory performance of “femininity.”


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Although she has, in fact, “command[ed]” the King to grant the fulfillment of her desire (2.1.194), she protests her chastity to the assembled suitors and blushingly retires before the King ratifies her authority and compels her to continue. Helena has come a long way from her earlier masochistic fixation on Bertram. In surveying the undesired suitors, her look frees itself from libidinal investment and so emulates the gaze by marking them as signifiers of her power (over the King), as participants in her spectacle. At the same time, Helena also derives power from being looked at, from being the center of attention, the belle of the ball. Her “to-be-looked-at-ness”—in cinema a signifier of female “lack,” according to Laura Mulvey17—becomes in the theater an attribute of power, a specularity that approximates the gaze rather than marking her as its object. As Lacan puts it, At the level of the phenomenal experience of contemplation, this allseeing aspect [of the gaze] is to be found in the satisfaction of a woman who knows that she is being looked at, on condition that one does not show her that one knows that she knows.18 Within the theatrical frame, the looked-upon central performer and her observers do indeed collude in the kind of disavowal of specularity that Lacan describes. Of course, Helena (or the actress performing her) is looked at not simply by the other figures on stage but by the play’s spectators as well. Yet here, too, she may escape a fetishizing look by availing herself of a strategy inaccessible to the film actress: returning the look. In this particular scene, such an effect could be achieved by placing the prospective suitors within the audience, so that when Helena sends forth her eye, she surveys “us” as well as them, bringing us into spectacle by breaking the fourth wall—by determining us, the audience, as lacking by linking us with those desiring suitors whom she rejects. Even in relation to the audience, then, Helena may represent not “to-be-looked-at-ness” but “looking at to-be-looked-at-ness.” When she finally claims Bertram, as Snyder observes, “she does her best to deny her role as aggressive desiring subject and to recast herself properly as object”:19 “I dare not say I take you, but I give / Me and my service, ever whilst I live, / Into your guiding power” (102–104). Bertram, however, discerns and resists this implicit emasculation, dismissing her protestations of vassalage and reclaiming the masculine privilege of looking: “I shall beseech your highness, / In such a business give me leave to use / The help of mine own eyes” (106–108). Bertram refuses to let Helena function as gaze for him. He breaks the stage picture of the happy affianced couple that Helena, in collusion with the King, has created. Indeed, if Bertram takes his protest to a King enthroned upstage right, and the humiliated Helena drifts downstage left, her stage observers shift accordingly, “facing out” in order to look at her. Helena takes a vulnerable


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position and accepts the status of “to-be-looked-at” as the audience no longer looks at her but looks at her being looked at. She is now clearly the object of the male look, the pawn in a male power struggle, standing by mutely as the King and Bertram proceed to debate her worth. If Helena is born to femininity and at certain moments compelled to achieve it, here it seems thrust upon her. To call attention to Helena’s “performative” femininity is not to accuse her of hypocrisy or willful deception. To point out that her self-effacements are self-serving is not to rehearse the tired, limited characterization of her as a twofaced, manipulative man hunter.20 It seems to me more helpful to understand Helena’s hyperfemininity as a kind of misrecognition that she persists in enacting. Helena can perform femininity with such conviction because she has successfully internalized a culturally imposed image of Woman. When Helena seems to affect femininity for the sake of covering her unfeminine, predatory tracks, she may not be crudely dissembling but, like a good method actress who loses herself in the role, truthfully simulating, thereby authenticating the role demanded of her. As Butler suggests, gender is . . . a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions.21 Helena challenges a restrictive standard of feminine chastity but, while doing so, she must answer to the chaste self-image shaped by patriarchal society. As John Berger puts it, a woman is “almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.”22 One reason, no doubt, that Helena has elicited such contradictory critical assessment is that she so vividly embodies the contradiction foundational to female subjectivity in a phallocentric system of meaning—that between self and cultural mirror, woman and Woman.23 In performance, one way to call attention to that contradiction would be to assign two actors to the role of Helena: a woman accompanied by a man in drag who would step in whenever Helena “acts feminine.” These two Helenas would then take turns, sometimes within the same scene (Helena’s interview with the King in 2.1, for instance) or even the same speech (for example, the first soliloquy), while at other times a single Helena would dominate (the female for Helena’s combative exchanges with Parolles, the cross-dressed male for her doleful evasions of the Countess). In a modern-dress production of All’s Well, costuming could accentuate this duality, with the cross-dressed male (as cultural mirror) far more unerringly “feminine” in appearance than the female, whose attire could be freer and more individualized, even androgynous. This prettified, feminine, male-constructed Helena then becomes kin to the lavishly festooned Parolles, a culturally constructed gender image compelling imitation. Such a


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choice dramatizes the process of misrecognition, exposing the performativity of gender in a manner congruent with much of feminist theater theory.24 Director/ theorist Jill Dolan took a similarly deconstructive approach to her staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: [W]hen Helena prostrated herself and pleaded with Demetrius to “beat me,” Puck halted the action, directing “ACT-UP” fairies to reconfigure Helena’s masochistic desires by taking over for her and Demetrius. The male and female actors moved in and out of the Balinese-derived masks which indicated these two roles, suggesting the construction of gender and the representational constraints placed on women.25 In addition, Dolan underlined the theatricality of gender by cross-dressing Theseus and Hippolyta in the final scene and by “cross-casting” Oberon and Titania: the fairy king was a mustachioed woman in suit and hat, the queen a man in high heels, leather miniskirt, and rhinestone-studded bra. The two-actor approach I describe might, however, have the regrettable effect of collapsing Helena’s core self with a “masculine” desire as symptomatic of cultural influence as her “feminine” self-abjection. The director may therefore prefer to capture Helena’s doubleness not through double-casting but through the concentration of its contradictory effects in a single actress—an actress capable of projecting a core self that dramatizes the contradiction as a symptom, preventing the role from sliding into static incoherence. Helena thus becomes as self-possessed and unself-consciously sensual in her active moments as she is self-effacing and studiously chaste in her passive ones. Traditional criticism has tended to portray Helena as either long-suffering Griselda or cunning vixen (thinly veiled versions of “madonna” and “whore”), either glossing over her audacious desire and celebrating her virtue or reading her virtue as a mask for audacity and regretting or deploring her duplicity. A characterization keyed to Helena’s doubleness invalidates these reductive caricatures, underscoring the inadequacy of phallocentric constructs to an understanding of Helena’s complex subjectivity. This approach challenges audiences to reconcile Helena’s indomitable sexuality with her obsequious femininity, to account somehow for a nice girl who seeks and obtains what has traditionally been considered the bad girl’s pleasure. Helena’s doubleness manifests itself unmistakably in her one scene with Bertram (prior to the play’s final moments). In one sense, she savors “feminine” subservience as the reward for her “masculine” boldness, embracing wifely subjugation with a fervor that mortifies Bertram. “Come, come, no more of that,” he protests when she pronounces herself “his most obedient servant” (72). She seems to accept—even to flaunt—a neutered passivity for the sake of eliciting male love.26 At the same time, her lavish self-effacements seem


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designed to compensate for her irrepressible, potentially transgressive desire. In asking Bertram for a kiss, she offers a muted sexual overture and claims some measure of her conjugal rights—yet in language so elliptical that it virtually negates the desire it manifests. When Bertram demands, “what would you have,” she answers, Something, and scarce so much; nothing indeed. I would not tell you what I would, my lord. Faith, yes: Strangers and foes do sunder, and not kiss. (2.5.83–86) Once more Helena struggles with the unspeakability of her desire, managing to speak it only indirectly and negatively. It is “something” which quickly becomes “nothing,” something she would not tell. Although she shifts back into affirming it (“yes”) she quickly subsides into a pause, manifesting her search for a language expressive of her desire. As though confirming the impossibility of finding it, she proceeds to describe the desired kiss as something strangers and foes do not do.27 As noted, Helena’s “masculinity” is as much a construct as her “femininity” for, as Foucault has argued, sexual desire is as much culturally engendered as naturally derived.28 Accordingly, Helena’s desire is directed toward the culturally approved end of marriage, an institution that, at least according to the puritan propaganda of Shakespeare’s time, confirms a woman in femininity by delivering her to permanent chastity and subservience.29 Helena herself seems to affirm her belief in this ideal of redemptive marriage when, in an attempt to enlist the Countess’s sympathies, she assesses the impossible alternatives imposed by a marriageless life: if yourself, Whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth, Did ever in so true a flame of liking Wish chastely, and love dearly, that your Dian Was both herself and Love, O then give pity To her whose state is such that cannot choose But lend and give where she is sure to lose; That seeks not to find that her search implies, But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies. (1.3.209–17) Helena presents the “feminine” alternative to marriage as the “sweet death” of terminal sexual pining, the “masculine” as the “loss” of chastity that attends


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“lending” and “giving” her body. She implies that she must choose between fruitlessly preserving her virginity or fruitlessly expending it. Marriage, by contrast, offers the fruitful option of expending and preserving her virginity—or at least preserving the virginal purity that chastity commends. In marriage, Dian is both herself, the goddess of chastity, and Love (or Venus), the goddess of desire. In marriage, that is, a woman may be both sexual and chaste, “living sweetly where she dies” in quite a different sense. This speech suggests that Helena wishes to channel her sexual desire into culturally idealized marital chastity. Yet Bertram annuls the marriage that Helena takes such pains to make, and in terms that aim at quashing her desire, imprisoning her in the female negative, in the land of “not” and “never.” “I have wedded her, not bedded her,” he informs his mother, “and have sworn to make the ‘not’ eternal.” In his letter to Helena, he does indeed afflict Helena with an “eternal not”: “in such a then I write a never.” In so doing, Bertram swears to make Helena’s virgin knot eternal, demanding that she remain lacking, accepting her status as the negative signifier of his masculine positive. Indeed, the “dreadful sentence” that Bertram hands Helena demands the very sexual renunciation that she undertakes in her pilgrimage. She embraces a monastical chastity, reconfiguring herself as a penitent whore getting herself to a nunnery, disavowing her desire and receding into iconicity, inspiring the Countess to compare her to the Virgin Mary (3.4.25–29). From this perspective, Helena’s pilgrimage becomes the ultimate compensatory performance of femininity. Some commentators have regarded the pilgrimage as a ruse for renewed pursuit of Bertram.30 While it is tempting to read her farewell sonnet as yet another coded disclosure of desire, its tone and content accord exactly with the masochistic, grief-stricken, guilt-ridden soliloquy in which Helena announces her intention of fleeing France in order to secure Bertram’s return. Shakespeare transforms what had been, in Boccaccio’s story, a relentless pursuit into a pilgrimage converted to pursuit by virtue of a miraculous coincidence. Once more Shakespeare seems to mystify Helena’s sexuality, portraying her as the prodigious recipient of another heavenly favor that works to validate her desire. Helena’s sexual renunciation ends when she locates another mirror of misrecognition: Diana, who defines femininity for Helena by virtue of her attractiveness to Bertram. As Catharine MacKinnon asserts, “socially, femaleness means femininity, which means attractiveness to men, which means sexual attractiveness, which means sexual availability on male terms.”31 In order to win Bertram, Helena, the devoted would-be wife, must refashion herself as sexual object. Her goal shifts from the fulfillment of desire to the achievement of desirability.32 Her desire is no longer simply the desire to wed but the desire to be desired. She thus identifies with, and acts through, the woman whom Bertram covets. Helena says not “I wish to become a woman” but, rather, “I wish to be


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like her whom I recognize as a woman,” mimetically replicating a gender ideal.33 Helena’s deputization of Diana offers an extreme instance of her need to conceal her desire. Only when Helena secures the services of a surrogate who agrees to embody that desire and risk the “tax of impudence” that Helena herself carefully dodges does she manage to secure Bertram. Helena’s employment of Diana allows her to remain on a kind of pilgrimage—away from patriarchy’s center (represented by the King) to a position on its margins where she can operate more daringly. She gets herself to a kind of secular nunnery, joining a confederacy of women who assist her in an intrigue that leads to her rebirth into patriarchal culture as wife and mother. Yet she must still take pains to prove her femininity, assuring the Widow of the lawfulness of her seemingly unchaste plot. She also continues to refer her power to the King (“That you may well perceive I have not wrong’d you / One of the greatest in the Christian world / Shall be my surety” [4.4.1–3]) and to invoke Heaven, mystifying her bribery of the Countess as an implement of divine providence (“Doubt not that heaven / Hath brought me up to be your daughter’s dower” [4.4.18–19]). Having, in effect, pimped Diana by exposing her to censure as a whore (a censure she actually suffers in the final scene) Helena undertakes to redeem Diana by reversing the mirroring process and turning her into an image of herself, a virgin positioned for advantageous marriage, a status the King ratifies in the final scene by extending to Diana the same privilege of choosing a husband that he once conferred upon Helena (5.3.327–28)—a position seemingly contrary to her wishes to “live and die a maid” (4.2.74).

Bertram’s Masculinity: Rite of Passage One must understand Bertram’s treatment of Helena in light of his quest for normative masculinity. He begins the play as a liminal figure, an “unseason’ed,” uninitiated male caught in the limbo between boyhood and manhood. In the play’s opening lines, his mother, the Countess, not only heralds but laments his passage into manhood—“in delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband”—registering his birth as a man as the death of a husband-surrogate, as though regretting her powerlessness to hold him in perpetual boyhood. The incest she evokes may be metaphorical but, within the oedipal plot enveloping Bertram’s development, it raises the specter of maternal engulfment threatening to his masculinity. His quest for manhood meets with two principal obstructions: an absence of men willing and able to help him achieve it and the continued presence of Helena, who, in consort with his mother, launches a campaign to marry him and (at least from his perspective) return him to maternal dominance. Bertram seems adrift in a world of strong women and weak men, men who fail him as father figures. His own father is dead and cannot instruct him in


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courtly or military arts. Lafew, despite an explicit promise to the Countess to advise Bertram (1.1.71–73), makes little attempt to do so, and on occasion even evinces scorn for his charge (2.3.99–101). The King, a surrogate father, seems rather to block Bertram’s passage into manhood, shaming him with marriage to Helena and excluding him from the wars. The histrionic Parolles happily fills the void, embodying a fiction of masculine grandeur that Bertram attempts to actualize, a mirror of misrecognition in which Bertram insists on seeing himself, a narcissistic reflection of an idealized self that confers an illusion of wholeness. In particular, the supposedly battle-tested, sumptuously plumed Parolles offers Bertram an image of military glamour and promotes participation in the Italian war as a rite of passage into manhood. Thus he praises Bertram’s determination to fight as evidence of potency: “Why, these balls bound, there’s noise in it. ’Tis hard!” (2.3.279–83). Yet the Countess and King both define manhood for Bertram as an imitation of his father, the true “perfect courtier” (1.1.60–61, 1.2.19–22). They admonish him to live up to his father’s memory. Parolles becomes a rival father figure whom Bertram’s own father, speaking through the King, indirectly disparages with his criticism of meretricious fashion-mongers who beget nothing but clothes (“whose judgments are / Mere fathers of their garments”). Later, Lafew implies that Parolles was begot as clothes, that he was not born but made by a tailor (2.5.16–19). These images impute to Parolles and his like sterility, unmanliness, and—through the emphasis on costume—imposture and barren theatricality. Indeed, by Lafew’s reckoning, Parolles constructs a persona that displays attributes of a social rank and gender to which he has no legitimate claim. By insisting on calling Parolles a “servant,” Lafew disputes his nobility (2.3.186–95, 242–51), and by referring to him as a “hen” (213), denies his masculinity. Indeed, Lafew tells Parolles, “I write man, to which title age cannot bring thee” (198–99) and casts similar aspersions when the King summons Parolles to testify against Bertram: “I saw the man today, if man he be” (5.3.203). Yet Parolles’ histrionics problematize the notion of a masculine essence implicit in Lafew’s disparagements. He functions as a symptom of the tailoredness of gender, performing a masculinity that seems as much a caricature of the cultural norm as the performed femininity of Helena. In following this counterfeit soldier-courtier, Bertram appears to be doing what Helena has already done: internalizing and authenticating a culturally inscribed myth of gender, saying not “I’m a man” but, rather, “I’m like him whom I recognize to be a man.” His father’s masculinity, such as Bertram confronts it, may be no more authentic than that of Parolles, for it is also derived from a performance, from the King’s dramatic death-bed celebration of the Count. The King constructs an exceptional figure, a hero/courtier of fabulous proportions, who seems partly a product of the King’s intense nostalgia for a lost youth. The King not only draws


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the Count’s character for Bertram to emulate but, at one key moment, speaks for him (“‘Let me not live,’ quoth he”). In a sense, the King impersonates Bertram’s father, giving the Count’s melancholic reflection on mortality a particularly dramatic recitation by turning it into his own death-bed speech—his own enactment of a father’s dying advice to his son. Indeed, with one foot in the grave, the King becomes a virtual medium for the deceased Count’s spirit. His line, “methinks I hear him now,” could refer not only to a recollected worldly voice but to a newly audible, other-worldly one. The King functions as the ghost of Bertram’s father, whose underlying message is, “remember me.” Yet the “me” that Bertram is asked to remember is so mystified and glorified that he appears to be left with a choice between two equally fantastical images of manhood: the inaccessibly legendary and the insidiously fashionable. Despite exhorting Bertram to emulate his father, the King denies him the opportunity to do so by forbidding his soldiership, rendering him unable to prove himself “the son of a worthy Frenchman” (2.1.11–12). Bertram implicitly equates exclusion from the war with emasculation: I shall stay here the forehorse to a smock, Creaking my shoes on the plain masonry, Till honor be bought up, and no sword worn But one to dance with. (2.1.30–33) Bertram accuses the King, who ought to have initiated him into manhood, of prolonging his boyhood by consigning him to the company of women, precluding his purchase of masculine honor, leaving him with a permanently sheathed, ornamental sword rather than a phallic weapon. His affected farewell to the departing soldiers also conveys his sense of emasculation: “I grow to you, and our parting is a tortur’d body” (2.1.36–37)—an image highly suggestive of castration. Moreover, in imagining himself the “forehorse to a smock,” Bertram imagines himself a woman’s beast of burden, an animal she drives and whips. He thus protests the emasculating reversal of the roles of man/woman, rider/horse, master/slave that had become homologous in Shakespeare’s England.34 Bertram’s paranoid fantasy seems to be almost instantly fulfilled. Upon choosing Bertram as husband, Helena offers her “service,” but, by coercing him into being her sexual partner, she implicitly commands Bertram to do her “service.” Rather than being allowed to “woo” and “wed” honor, as the King commands the departing soldiers, Bertram becomes an object of a woman’s wooing and wedding. The King, at Helena’s behest, subjects Bertram to the very calamity he had urged his soldiers to avoid bondage to female sexuality:


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Those girls of Italy, take heed of them. They say our French lack language to deny If they demand. Beware of being captives Before you serve. (2.1.19–22) Bertram is “captive before he serves,” in thrall not to one of “those girls of Italy” whom the King stigmatizes, but to the girl from Rossillion, the girl next door, with whom he grew up. While he is primed to resent any imposed responsibility that keeps him from going a-soldiering, marriage to Helena is, from his perspective, the very worst of fates, regressing him even further into boyhood by returning him to the maternal domination he presumably escaped when ending his constrictive “marriage” to the Countess.35 Perhaps the best demonstration of the distance between Bertram and Helena comes when Parolles, urging Bertram to “steal away” to the wars in order to avoid the emasculation of marriage, characterizes Helena’s virginity in terms radically different from her own: He wears his honor in a box unseen That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home, Spending his manly marrow in her arms, Which should sustain the bound and high curvet Of Mars’ fiery steed. (2.3.279–83) The site of Helena’s miraculously generative sexual love becomes a lack, an unseen box, a black hole that consumes Bertram’s manly essence, an effeminizing, contemptible “kicky-wicky.” The opportunity to mount Mars’ fiery steed in manly combat rescues Bertram from his emasculating role as forehorse to a smock. That Bertram’s rejection of Helena stems more from sexual dread than class prejudice seems borne out by his dismissal of the King’s promise to endow her with title and dowry. If Bertram were concerned solely with social status, marriage to the King’s favorite would seem distinctly advantageous. The King, after his lengthy lecture equating honor with virtue, puts the matter quite plainly: “if thou canst like this creature as a maid, / I can create the rest.” Bertram’s response is equally unambiguous: “I cannot love her, nor will strive to do’t” (2.3.142–43, 145). Bertram “cannot” love Helena. She cannot be an object of his sexual desire, cannot be a “real girl” in Havelock Ellis’s terms.36 This fact is striking, as she so easily achieves that status with the other men in the play, sexually provoking Parolles, Lafew, and the King alike. Lafew considers Helena so much a “real girl” that he would like to consign those seemingly standoffish suitors to the


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fate of castration (2.3.86–88). From Lafew’s perspective, anyone who would not consider Helena a “real girl” is not a real man. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Bertram cannot love Helena because she is a forbidden object. The Count’s responsibility for “breeding” Helena (2.3.114) reinforces her status as a sister figure. The Countess’s sponsorship of her matrimonial campaign makes her a kind of mother-surrogate as well. The Countess sees in the passionate Helena an image of her younger self (1.3.128– 31). By colluding in Helena’s plot, the Countess aims to help Helena secure her son as husband, to revive by proxy the relationship she herself has lost.37 Helena also may be considered a maternal figure by virtue of her status as partner to the King, Bertram’s surrogate father. In an apparent reversal of the oedipal plot, in which the son sacrifices the mother as the price of masculine autonomy, the King blocks Bertram’s achievement of manhood by forcing upon him the object of his own sexual interest (“follows it, my lord,” Bertram protests, “to bring me down / Must answer for your raising?” [111–13]).38 In addition, the first of the identities Helena hopes to derive from marriage to Bertram is the one conspicuously removed from the realm of courtly love that engenders them: mother (“There shall your master have a thousand loves, / A mother, a mistress, and a friend”).39 On one level, of course, Helena simply invokes a biological fact: she may become pregnant as a consequence of intercourse with Bertram. Indeed, motherhood is an essential requirement of Bertram’s impossible conditions for marrying her (“when thou canst . . . show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to”). On another, she explicitly identifies with the very maternal image that repels Bertram and, by raising the spectre of castration, drives him to the wars. Within an oedipal framework, Helena’s maternal associations make her a forbidden object, a mystified (m)other both attractive and repellant to Bertram. In one sense, then, his military campaign represents a retreat: like Parolles, he “runs away for advantage when fear [in this case fear of Helena’s sexuality] proposes the safety” (1.1.201–203). Lavatch later characterizes Bertram’s campaign in precisely the same terms. Bertram will not be “killed”—his manhood will not be “lost”because he runs away from Helena: “The danger is in standing to’t; that’s the loss of men, though it be the getting of children” (3.2.37–42). If the swaggering, ornamental Parolles mirrors the glamorous masculinity for which Bertram strives, the wisecracking, enigmatic Clown voices the sexual anxiety that underlies it.40 His first jest portrays female sexuality as a force that deflates male sexuality in its insatiable demand for “service,” hence the Clown’s preposterously cheerful acceptance of cuckoldry: “the knaves come to do that for me which I am aweary of. He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to inn the crop” (1.3.43–45). Thus Lavatch celebrates his nonsexual servitude to the Countess: “that man should be at woman’s command and yet no hurt done!” (1.3.92–93).


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In addition, the Clown parallels Bertram’s course by presenting himself as a man recoiling from marriage and female sexuality (“I have no mind to Isbel since I was at court . . . the brains of my Cupid’s knock’d out, and I begin to love, as an old man loves money, with no stomach” [3.2.12, 14–16]). When Bertram returns from the wars, having embraced the sexual experience that Lavatch eschews, the Clown suggests that the patch upon his cheek conceals syphilitic scars, reading the patch as a signifier of Bertram’s corruption by female sexuality (“it is your carbodano’d face” [4.5.101]). Lavatch seems to function as Bertram’s secret sharer in a second sense: his scant commentary on Helena indicates a comparable need to construct her as a sexless madonna. Late in the play, thinking Helena dead, Lavatch affectionately eulogizes her as “the sweet marjoram of the sallet or rather the herb of grace” (4.5.16–17). This remark suggests that his earlier misogynistic ditty decrying female turpitude and seemingly linking Helena with Helen of Troy might actually mark her as the unnamed “one good woman” exempt from his slanders, dissociated from her notorious namesake and the corrupting female sexuality she epitomizes (1.3.70–79). Lavatch’s need to desexualize Helena provides a subtext for his only direct speech to her, in which he offers the seemingly arbitrary antijoke about the Countess’s “wellness.” In locating “wellness” in the other world, Lavatch may be admonishing Helena for her excessively worldly (that is, sexual) conduct, urging her to a monastical chastity, implicitly scolding her unchaste entrapment of Bertram. His later eulogy celebrates her seeming compliance, her expiration at the end of her penitential trek to a holy shrine, her ascension to saintly martyrdom. Bertram so distinguishes himself in the Florentine wars that he ascends to the position of “general of our horse” and wins the masculine honor he had so craved. The scene of his ascension (3.3) often has been cut in performance but it affords an opportunity for staging a grandiose military ceremony dramatizing Bertram’s ritual birth as a man, as young warrior-god. The ceremony could center on Bertram’s reception of a sword, symbolizing his supposed acquisition of the phallus. In such a staging, the Duke unfurls the sword, raises it high, executes some histrionic sword salute—collectively seconded by a troop of sword-wielding soldiers—then lowers it to a kneeling Bertram, who takes hold of it, kisses it, then rises to receive it. Perhaps a pounding of drums accompanies the ceremony, which climaxes in multiple gun shots. As the thunderous volleys cease, Bertram steps forward and declares, “Great Mars, I put myself in thy file; / Make me but like my thoughts, and I shall prove / A lover of thy drum, hater of love” (9–11). Bertram occupies the same position that Helena did in 2.3: the center of attention, the object of an admiring, even fetishizing, male look. Like Helena, Bertram functions as both spectacle (to be looked at) and simulated gaze (determining through looking). He is the glittering, glamorous presence who


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constitutes the others as lacking, as needing to be seen by him. Like Helena, Bertram may function as gaze for the play’s spectators as well, if they are joined by soldiers extending the lacking army beyond the proscenium arch. If the ceremony seems sufficiently overwrought and theatrical, it may begin to convey the extent to which Bertram delivers himself to a role, embracing a mythical masculinity and effectively becoming his own Parolles, who ought to be exiled to the periphery during this scene. Bertram’s birth as a man coincides with his willing entrance into spectacle, his assumption of the image of ruthless warrior after rejecting that of domesticated husband. If Bertram, contrary to the Clown’s insinuations about his patch, sustains a bleeding wound—either in battle or in ritual—his ascent to manhood can include a ceremonial purgation of femininity familiar to tribal rites of passage: the bleeding wound symbolizes a male vulva that enables a masculine rebirth superseding his original birth through woman. By spilling blood and voicing rage (declaring himself a lover of Mars’ drum and a hater of love), Bertram “gets the woman” out of himself and achieves manhood.41 At the mid-point of the play, Bertram and Helena appear to have achieved the extremes of emblematic masculinity and femininity. One could underscore this polarity in performance by creating a tableau at the end of 3.4. (invariably the end of “Act One” in performance), presenting Bertram as gilded, swordbrandishing military hero and Helena as supplicating, saintly madonna. Barbara Dameshek’s 1993 production for Shakespeare Santa Cruz extended this idea, counterpointing a soldiers’ chorus chanting in rap style “lover of thy drum, hater of love” with the ethereal singing of women dressed in white who assisted Helena in a highly stylized donning of her pilgrim’s costume: as the Countess read her letter, Helena walked down a path of white gauze fabric while wrapping around her waist a banner that contained the first line of her sonnet (“I am Saint Jacques’ pilgrim, thither gone” [4]). Some critics have attempted to justify Bertram’s rejection of Helena, or at least to present it sympathetically, as an understandable rebellion against a degrading forced marriage.42 This laudable championing of Bertram’s cause ignores the fact that a character must first become a subject before an audience can take offense at his or her being treated as an object. Theatrically speaking, Bertram has not yet become enough of a subject for the spectator to perceive his injury when the play’s sympathetic heroine chooses him as husband. His first two scenes are public, dominated by his elders, allowing him little opportunity to display an individuated character. In the first, eager to leave for Paris, he struggles to play the dutiful, respectful son. In the second, he strives to make a favorable impression on the King. Only in his third appearance, free of his elders and petulantly protesting his exclusion from the war, does he exhibit a discernible subjectivity. Yet this effusion of personality is unlikely to win him many admirers. Nobody likes a whiner.


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Most critics have found Bertram manifestly unworthy of Helena’s devotion.43 Certainly his conduct alienates the play’s other characters, each of whom defames him at one time or another. He humiliates and abandons Helena, defies and enrages the King, and so offends his mother that she resolves to disown him and later endorses the King’s threat to punish him—possibly even to execute him. His callous treatment of Diana repulses his comrades-in-arms. Offered an unearned second chance to regain the favor of his benefactors, he instead renews their ire—particularly the King’s—and to save himself from censure and disgrace, he contemptuously scorns the woman to whom he had sworn eternal love. An unremittingly unsympathetic Bertram poses considerable problems for performance, however: Helena appears hopelessly foolish and deluded if the object of her pursuit is a thoroughly disagreeable clod who unequivocally disdains her. Since the play clearly derives dramatic interest from the discrepancy between Helena’s unquestioning desire and Bertram’s questionable desirability, the crucial question for the director to address is this: just how bad is Bertram? To what extent should he be seen as “worth it?” To what extent should one mitigate his defects in performance? Should the audience perceive something potentially redemptive in his character or potentially receptive in his attitude toward Helena? A performance that predicates Bertram’s unequivocal inadequacy generates less tension and conflict—ingredients essential to dramatic interest—than one that leaves the question of Bertram’s worth unresolved. Who wants to watch a play about a terminally besotted girl pursuing an insufferably churlish boy? In such a production, the play’s ending becomes an unambiguous anti-climax, confirming what the audience could be presumed to have known all along: that Bertram is a boor, Helena a masochist, and their marriage an almost certain catastrophe. Such an approach does not so much deconstruct the comic love story as decisively preempt it. Indeed, the play’s notorious open-endedness depends upon preserving the possibility of a comic resolution—which in turn requires the possibility of Bertram’s reformation, which requires presenting him as reformable, or at least worth reforming, and therefore worth attending to as the play progresses. Directors have employed various means to mitigate Bertram’s obnoxiousness. Some have cast a physically striking, charismatic actor (such as Mike Gwilym, who played the part for Trevor Nunn) in order to make Helena’s attraction credible, while others have opted to accent Bertram’s youthfulness in order to make his trespasses tolerable. Paul Venables, for instance, who played the part in Barry Kyle’s 1989 RSC production, was “baby-faced,” “guileless,” and “slightly goofy”: “the sense that his errors and offenses were committed in a blissfully naive thoughtlessness . . . made him ultimately forgivable at the play’s end.”44 Directors have also aimed to redeem Bertram by lending him a subtextual complexity that qualifies and complicates his mistreatment of Helena. In Peter Hall’s recent RSC production, for instance, Toby Stephens’s callow, self-involved


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Bertram begins to mature in the second act when tested by the ravages of war and the first confused stirrings of sexual passion. The actor’s subtext registered strongly with one critic who wrote, “[Bertram] doesn’t seem to know what to feel, but it’s clear he’s feeling something deeply, for the first time.”45 Helena thus became the jewel in the crown of his hard-won maturation. Trevor Nunn devised a different subtext for Bertram in his 1981 production, drawing on a psychoanalytic reading of repressed desire. According to Harriet Walter, who played Helena, In Trevor’s scenario, Bertram had funny dreams about Helena. She’s someone who’s been raised in the household but is only the daughter of a family retainer. So he’s somehow disturbed by her because he mustn’t love her. He doesn’t like the effect she has on him so he cuts her out.46 In Nunn’s view, according to Walter, “Bertram had loved Helena all along but discovered it too late.”47 Yet Gwilym, Nunn’s Bertram, objected to this interpretation and consequently keyed his performance to the dismissive gestures on the surface rather than the messier emotions underlying them.48 Nunn’s choice offers the actor playing Bertram an emotional investment in Helena that adds drama and intrigue to his mistreatment of her, creating and heightening the conflict on which drama depends. Such a subtext could establish that Bertram struggles against feelings for Helena that confuse and unnerve him, that he rejects her not out of contempt but out of fear. Some directors have flirted with this interpretation, in particular turning Helena’s request for a kiss into a stimulus for feelings that belie Bertram’s apparent disdain for her. In Noel Willman’s (1953) and Tyrone Guthrie’s productions (1959), Bertram seemed ready to grant the kiss until, reminded of Parolles’ presence, he recoiled and brusquely dismissed Helena, as though admonished by Parolles’ image of uncompromised masculinity.49 In John Houseman’s production, as well as in Kyle’s, Bertram willed himself to reject Helena and then remorsefully sought to make amends, turning to her as if to speak a kind word in Houseman’s show, seeming tempted to hug her in Kyle’s.50 In all four cases, an agitated and uncertain Bertram evinces feelings that undermine the genuineness of his rejection. He seems motivated by a need to defend himself, not only against the force of her passion but also against the unseemliness, the unmanliness, of his own. These choices illustrate the directorial necessity of planting in earlier scenes effects necessary to those in later ones. A bitter and hateful Bertram in 2.5 may so alienate the audience as to foreordain an unambiguously dissatisfying ending instead of a provocatively ambiguous one. In Elijah Moshinsky’s BBC production, for instance, Ian Charleson’s Bertram dismissed Helena harshly and disdainfully, as though her request for a kiss mortally offended him. Indeed,


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Charleson, normally a resourceful actor, was so narrowly sulky and conceited as Bertram, and Angela Down so relentlessly downcast as Helena, that long before their final pairing off, which Moshinsky seemingly wished to portray as a touching reconciliation, I had lost interest in them. A reconciliation of such antithetical forces can only be untenably miraculous or preposterous rather than intriguingly, even irritatingly tenable. A Bertram with some measure of merit or appeal or mitigating “unseasonedness” not only keeps the ending open but also helps ensure that Helena will appear uncomfortably obsessed rather than foolishly deluded. . . .

Staging the Bed-Trick Indeed, if the bed-trick were dramatized, it would literally dislocate the narrative of Bertram’s debauchery: “I will tell you a thing,” the Second Lord confides to this brother, “but you shall let it dwell darkly with you” (4.3.10–11). This report of one woman’s degradation would then give way to the dramatization of another woman’s desire. Within the oedipal plot, says de Lauretis, “the place and time of feminine desire” are “nowhere” and “now,” which are representable only from an “elsewhere of vision” and within “a different narrative temporality.”60 In virtually every performance of All’s Well, the place of the bed-trick is precisely “nowhere” or “elsewhere.” Its narrative temporality is other than the play’s—parallel but not precisely coincident with that of the French Captains’ gossip. Indeed, the literal death they ascribe to Helena becomes the only means of registering the metaphorical “death” of sexual pleasure she experiences during the bed-trick (4.3.47–59).61 Through the bed-trick, Helena arrests Bertram’s teleological quest for manhood and forces it into the atemporal “now” of her desire, replacing the march of “masculine” time with the occupation of “feminine” space. This hitherto unrepresented space of the bed-trick emblematizes a female difference unrepresentable within a phallocentric framework that associates that space with a “nothing-to-be-seen.” If Helena’s goal in the bed-trick is to undo the “knot” that Bertram vowed to make eternal, a staged bed-trick can begin to undo her “not,” to deliver her from the constraints of a “lacking” femininity. The staged bed-trick serves as a powerful gestus by creating an alternative space (not but) of female erotic agency, defamiliarizing Helena by unveiling her persistently veiled desire, enabling her to embrace unapologetically the status of sexual subject. Far from resolving her baffling doubleness, the staged bed-trick exacerbates it, intensifying the aggressiveness that belies Helena’s habitual selfabjection, stressing not only her contradictory status within the play’s narrative but the contradictory status of women assimilated to a phallocentric construct of idealized femininity to which they are always already unassimilable. This effect of heightened contradiction is precisely what de Lauretis identifies as the hallmark of the most effective feminist art:


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[I]t should be possible to work through [narrative] codes in order to shift or redirect identification toward the two positionalities of desire that define the female’s oedipal situation; and if the alternation between them is protracted enough . . . the viewer may come to suspect that such duplicity, such contradiction cannot and perhaps even need not be resolved.62 By accentuating Helena’s doubleness, the staged bed-trick underscores her nonmimetic subversiveness, her assertion of a difference ultimately unconforming to oedipal femininity. It brings her closer to hysteria, to a realm outside the oedipal plot where she must serve as the source of her own signification. This outside realm, this elsewhere, substitutes unscripted body language for sanctioned verbal text, allowing Helena to replace the passive silent body Bertram expects with her own powerful “speaking body.” She controls “elsewhere” by controlling its speechless discourse, effectively inscribing a condition of lack on Bertram’s body. The circumstances that she stipulates—silence and darkness— deprive him of the operations that define him as masculine subject: speech and dominating look. Helena positions Bertram so that he lacks language to deny what she commands, transforming him into precisely what he sought in Diana: a masterable body. An often overlooked marker of Helena’s mastery is her curious post-coital detention of Bertram. “When you have conquer’d my yet maiden bed,” Diana says on Helena’s behalf, “remain there but an hour, nor speak to me” (4.2.57–58). What, one must ask, is the point of this detention? What takes place during that hour? Surely the two lovers do not simply lie there together, not seeing, not speaking, not touching. It seems that Bertram is being set up for something—but that something is never explicitly revealed. Does the dilation of the trick express a desire on Helena’s part for a more sustained intimacy, for an extension of “now,” for satisfaction on her terms? Does it aim beyond mere sexual intercourse for the “something more” of jouissance? Does it portend Bertram’s unknowing immersion in the space he sought to penetrate and withdraw from, his submergence in the neverland of “there”? In arranging the assignation with Diana, Bertram wishes for nothing more than the performance of sex, a “trick” in another sense of the word. Helena not only offers him a different kind of trick but attempts to elicit a different kind of performance, one that transcends a merely performative sexuality. This curious ellipsis not only offers another veiled glimpse of Helena’s erotic agency but also evokes her need to tame the beast, to transform a onenight stand into a foretaste of conjugal love. The moments preceding Bertram’s entrance could parallel those of Helena’s aborted wedding night, which one could dramatize by cutting the Clown from 2.4. and setting the scene in a bedchamber, showing Helena readying herself for Bertram’s arrival, attended by women who hasten away upon hearing a knock


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at the door. Helena then walks to the door and opens it, admitting not the longed-for Bertram but his leering emissary Parolles, who reports that Bertram must postpone “the great prerogative and rite of love” (2.4.41). One could then repeat this staging for the later scene: once more Helena readies herself, attended by women (this time her coconspirators Diana, the Widow, and Mariana), but this time she too flees upon hearing the knock, leaving Diana to welcome her wayward husband. The trick itself could begin with Diana’s placing a blindfold on Bertram and yielding her place to Helena. The blindfold not only provides a realistic explanation for Bertram’s inability to distinguish her from Diana but also visually links him with his double, Parolles, who is likewise blindfolded and tricked in the very next scene. The blindfold would both deprive Bertram of the look and signify his blindness to the threat of castration that originally drove him from Helena. Diana could plausibly place the blindfold on Bertram if the first part of the scene were staged as a playful chase, a physicalization of the verbal cat-andmouse game that characterized their last meeting. At some point, Helena could literally emerge from the shadows and replace Diana as the object of Bertram’s pursuit. Extending the implications of Bertram’s post-coital detention, Helena could then initiate a kind of suspended foreplay, deflecting Bertram’s lust-driven energies into more dilatory, sensual rhythms, indicating a desire for “something more” and ultimately turning his hasty act of undressing into a sustained performance for her benefit. If one positions Helena upstage of Bertram, the audience perceives her as looking subject and Bertram as looked-upon object. Helena emulates the gaze by making a spectacle of Bertram, constituting him as lacking through the projection and control of her desiring look. One could underline this powerful “gaze” by visually contrasting it with her earlier powerless look: during her woebegone first soliloquy she could actually watch Bertram watch himself in a mirror as he finishes dressing for his journey to Paris. In the bed-trick, by contrast, he undresses in the mirror of Helena’s preemptive look. Here, as in the husband-choosing ceremony, Helena signifies not “to-belooked-at-ness” but “determining-through-looking.” In both scenes, she elicits and manages male desire, drawing a look that manifests lack. But now she looks back, unaided by the King’s authority, desiring the man who desires her despite himself, functioning as the gaze for him as he previously did for her. The play provides other possibilities for reinforcing this look. In 3.5, for instance, Diana, her mother, and Mariana all position themselves as spectators to the triumphal procession of soldiers. Diana “sends forth her eye” over these glistening combatants and lights on Bertram as desired object. The previously all-male military world admits female spectators who watch a display of macho glamour that once more positions Bertram as “to-be-looked-at” male.


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Similarly, one could turn Bertram’s attempted seduction of Diana (4.2) into a spectacle by positioning Helena, the Widow, and Mariana as spectators, concretizing the female frame of reference that contains the scene. Within this play-within-a-play, Diana acts the part of sexual tease, defamiliarizing the role of “the girl-who-says-no-but-means-yes” by exposing it as performative, presenting herself instead as “girl-who-says-yes-but-means-no.” The concealed female audience also marks Bertram’s incipient masculinity as performative. “My mother told me just how he would woo,” exclaims Diana, “As if she sate in ’s heart. She says all men / Have the like oaths” (4.2.69–71). Like Helena in her hyperfeminine mode, Bertram enacts a culturally inscribed script without knowing it, affirming his kinship with “all men” by venting unctuous oaths and fulsome endearments in order to arrange a one-night stand. Because the play’s audience watches not only Bertram’s performance but also the women watching it, the scene parallels that of Parolles’ capture, in which concealed pranksters also watch their victim walk into a trap. One could extend this staging of the female look in the bed-trick, with Diana, the Widow, and Mariana joining Helena as spectators to Bertram’s striptease. In addition, Helena’s reanimation of the King provides a parallel opportunity to accent her sexual power and to stage the unstaged. The cure, like the bed-trick, constitutes a significant “lack” in the play’s narrative, its absence similarly serving to mask Helena’s sexuality—at least insofar as the play strongly hints that the cure is sexual in nature, that Helena revives the King by arousing him. Indeed, Helena’s interview with the King functions as a kind of antecedent bed-trick. Often set in a bedchamber, it is an erotically charged, intimate meeting that forges the contract that the bed-trick ultimately fulfills. Calling himself Cressida’s uncle, Lafew insinuates that Helena’s medicinal powers derive from her sexual allure and later attributes the King’s revival to an increase in lustiness, an interpretation Bertram seems to share in calling it a “raising” (2.1.72–78, 97–98; 2.3.41). The King suggests that entertaining Helena’s cure would be tantamount to prostitution and ultimately yields to her in terms that connote an assent to sexual union: “sweet practicer, thy physic I will try, / That ministers thy own death if I die” and “thy will by my performance shall be serv’d” (2.1.185–86, 201). In addition, while the King claims his “heart owes the malady,” the association of “fistula” with the anus makes Helena’s attempted cure a particularly intimate act and connects All’s Well’s stricken monarch with the Fisher King, whose wound “between the thighs” (suggesting emasculation) seems similarly sexual in origin.63 The sexual symbolism of the King’s ailment, combined with the sexual language surrounding its proposed cure, give the impression of a sexually contracted or sexually disabling disease. If the King is so afflicted, poised to die because infected by a woman, his warning to departing soldiers to avoid Italian girls, combined with the Clown’s suggestions that Bertram’s patch


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conceals a syphilitic scar, circulates even more widely the fear of female sexuality that shadows Helena’s pursuit of Bertram. More to the point, it burdens Helena with the weight of male sexual dread, necessitating the vindication of her chastity. Although this scene comes the closest of any in the play to affirming Helena’s erotic agency, it nevertheless shrouds that agency in mystical incantation and miraculous faith healing. The director may therefore extend the feminist gestus simply by judiciously demystifying Helena’s hieratic ministrations to the King, making clear in performance the extent to which she not only persuades and inspires but sexually excites him, inducing appreciable gains in vigor as the scene progresses. This preliminary rejuvenation both anticipates and initiates the actual healing. It could even be said to substitute for it. Some directors have attempted, with varying results, to bring the scene’s sexual undercurrents to the surface, to suggest that Helena secures Bertram as bed-mate by, figuratively speaking, going to bed with the King. In John Barton’s 1967 production, Helena was reduced to a “tease of a girl” who titillated the King by sitting on his bed and fluffing up his pillows,64 and in Moshinsky’s BBC version she was a proper young woman whose erotic effect on the King— culminating in a lingering kiss—seemed both incongruous and unintentional. Closer to the mark perhaps was Barry Kyle, who, in his 1989 RSC production, attempted to preserve the scene’s mysticism as well as accent its eroticism: his Helena “kick[ed] off her shoes to perform a circling, energetic, sexually assertive, slightly fey dance,” exuding an aura of “white witchery.”65 My own choice would be to extend the erotics of Helena’s encounter with the King into a staging of the cure itself, first by eroticizing the gesture of “laying on hands” suggestive of faith healing.66 At the half-line, “my art is not past power,” Helena could pause, reach under the King’s nightshirt, and place her hand on his chest, a gesture at once sensual and clinical, disclosing Helena’s mode of diagnosis: “nor you past cure.” Given that more intimate areas of the King’s anatomy might require a healing touch, one could also capture the scene’s peculiar mixture of sex and witchery by having Helena perform a kind of mystical sensual massage, moving her hands soothingly and rhythmically around the stricken parts of his body without actually touching him, an image that extends the conflation of faith healing with sexual stimulation. If one dispenses with the arguably dispensable interview between the Countess and the Clown (2.2), one could extend this mystical therapy into a dramatization of the cure itself. Having regained full vigor at Helena’s hands, the King could rise from his sickbed and continue to respond to Helena’s gestural stimulations, initiating a pattern of rhythmic movement that could slowly shift into a celebratory, intimate dance, setting the stage for their dancing entrance in the next scene. Of course, these displays of female erotic power have their limitations. The dominating, objectifying look afforded Helena by the staged bed-trick reverses


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rather than replaces a masculine–feminine polarity, supporting asymmetrical power relations. Moreover, to the extent that Helena secures control of the King and Bertram by withholding satisfaction of the desire she elicits, she claims the only kind of power seemingly available to women in a phallocentric economy: the power derived from the excitation and frustration of male desire, from “blowing up” men and thereby inducing surrender to their will. Nevertheless, the powerful position of speaking body/looking subject that Helena achieves through a staged bed-trick has the subversive effect of freeing her desire from “feminine” constraint, defamiliarizing the disabling gender roles with and against which Bertram and Helena struggle. By decisively (if only temporarily) giving up the “feminine,” Helena establishes the limits of gendertyping and thus evokes a more nuanced enactment of gender than the oedipal polarity permits. In addition, by releasing Helena’s repressed erotic energies and suggesting her longing for the “something more” of jouissance, by accentuating the anxiety and incongruity that attain to her pursuit of Bertram, the staged bedtrick potentially restores the female difference that Bertram—and the play—so fretfully elides. NOTES 1. Bulletin of the Shakespeare Association of America 16 (July 1992), 4. 2. Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (New York: Macmillan, 1931). Although Lawrence insists that these plays should be accepted simply as stories, requiring the same level of unsophisticated reception as the widely known traditional tales from which, by his reckoning, they were derived (73–77), folklore scholars have for some time uncovered the potent cultural and psychological dramas that such tales encode. See, for instance, Alan Dundes, “The Psychoanalytic Study of Folklore,” in Parsing through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987), 3–46. All’s Well may be considered a play that pushes the folktale’s subterranean psychic drama provocatively close to the narrative surface, threatening the uncomplicated unfolding of the oedipal plot and the gender ideology it encodes. A feminist gestus aims to heighten the drama of that threatened rupture by staging the play’s repressed contents. 3. See, for example, Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 84–86; Barbara Hodgdon, “The Making of Virgins and Mothers: Sexual Signs, Substitution Scenes, and Doubled Presences in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Philological Quarterly 66 (1987) 47–55; Susan Snyder, “‘The King’s Not Here’: Displacement and Deferral in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (Spring 1992); and “All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988), 73–77. 4. References to All’s Well That Ends Well are based on The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 5. I italicize feminine and masculine in order to make clear that I use the terms to denote modes of desire (passive and active) while distancing myself from the Freudian view that such modes are rooted in the biological difference between male and female.


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6. I borrow the resonant phrase “curled darling” from Robert Ornstein, Shakespeare’s Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1986), 182. Carolyn Asp, in her fascinating psychoanalytic account of the play, also notes Helena’s initial embrace of masochistic femininity, “Subjectivity, Desire and Female Friendship in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Literature and Psychology 32 (1986), 52. 7. For an extremely helpful discussion of the paradigm of “closed femininity,” see Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern England, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (U of Chicago P, 1986), 123–42. 8. “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines: ‘These Are Learned Paradoxes,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (Spring 1987), 1–18. 9. The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism Together with Related Essays and Indexes to Earlier Volumes (London: Methuen, 1958), 137. 10. Knight, The Sovereign Flower, 138. In a sense, Knight extends Helena’s (or Shakespeare’s) mystification of virginity: “the love is infinite, ‘a thousand loves’; it is the window to a great insight. It may be related to the state of perfect integration from which poetry is born.” 11. “Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1985), 50. 12. Cf. Mariana in Pericles: “If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep, / Untied I still my virgin knot will keep” (4.2.146–47). 13. See Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985), 144–45. 14. Jardine perceives a more fundamental split in Helena’s behavior: her exemplary passivity in the play’s second half atones for her transgressive forwardness in the first. “[T]he sexually active Helena of the first part of the play [becomes] the virtuously knowing, ideal wife” (“Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines,” 11). I would contend that Helena is consistent throughout the play in mitigating her audacity with displays of “femininity,” that her recession in the play’s second half simply extends her strategy—or habit—of compensatory selfeffacement. Her urge to assume an exemplary femininity reflects Shakespeare’s need—or, rather, a cultural need working through him—to purify and mystify female sexuality in order to neutralize its provocations. Hence, the possible value of a staged bed-trick that foregrounds and demystifies female desire. 15. As Jardine points out, the infamy that Helena courts, if realized, could “ostracize [her] from the community, recasting her wisdom as witchcraft” (“Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines,” 10). 16. Some commentators believe that the young lords are indeed standoffish. See, for instance, Joseph Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of All’s Well That Ends Well and Its Critics (Liverpool UP, 1968), 155–56. I find it difficult to credit this reading because of the unlikelihood of the wards’ openly flouting the King’s formidable demands for cooperation (2.3.56, 72–73). It is far more likely that Lafew takes a position peripheral to the proceedings and so misconstrues their meaning. 17. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975), 11–12. 18. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 75.


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19. “All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens,” 11. 20. While relatively few modern critics have subscribed to such an extremely negative view of Helena (see, however, Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare’s Comedies [Oxford UP, 1960], 145–66; and Richard A. Levin, “All’s Well That Ends Well and ‘All Seems Well,’” Shakespeare Studies 13 [1980], 131–44), many have felt compelled, until very recently, to judge Helena’s character in some measure, and have often found cause to indict or at least regret the duplicitous and predacious tactics that belie her celebrated virtue. See E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1925), 200–207; Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in All’s Well,” ELH 12 (1954), 17–29; Alexander Leggatt, Modern Language Quarterly 32 (1971), 22–41; W. L. Godschalk, “All’s Well and the Morality Play,” Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974), 61–70; David Scott Kastan, “All’s Well That Ends Well and the Limits of Comedy,” ELH 52 (1985), 575–89. Critics, of course, have also judged in Helena’s favor. See my own earlier essay, “‘That Your Dian / Was Both Herself and Love’: Helena’s Redemptive Chastity,” Essays in Literature 17 (1990), 160–78. Judgments of Helena perhaps follow inevitably from a formalist focus on the play’s “genre trouble” rather than its “gender trouble” (to borrow Judith Butler’s term). 21. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 140. 22. Ways of Seeing (New York: Viking, 1973), 121. 23. De Lauretis discusses this contradiction in especially helpful terms in Alice Doesn’t, 156–59. 24. See, for instance, Janelle Reinelt, “Feminist Theory and the Problem of Performance,” Modern Drama 32 (March 1987), 48–57. 25. Stacy Wolf and Michael Peterson, review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theatre Journal 42 (May 1992), 228. 26. See Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1964), 22, 112–35. According to Freud’s reductive biological model, the little girl’s desire shifts from wanting a penis to wanting the one who possesses it. She thus surrenders or represses the active part of her libido (“masculine” desire) in return for her father’s (i.e., male) love, consenting to her condition of “lack,” of passivity and dependence. 27. I am indebted to Ralph Alan Cohen for pointing out the pervasiveness of the negative in the language of All’s Well in “The (K)notty Discourse of All’s Well That Ends Well,” unpublished manuscript, presented to the Shakespeare Association of America, 1993. 28. “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledge, the strengthening of controls and resistance, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power” (The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Random House, 1978], 105–106). 29. Although she overestimates the liberating effects of Elizabethan marriage for women, Juliet Dusinberre nonetheless gives a good account of the ideal of mari-


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tal chastity with which Puritan reformers sought to displace a monastical (catholic) one (Shakespeare and the Nature of Women [London: Macmillan, 1975], 20–63). 30. Richard A. Levin offers the most extreme version of this view, essentially arguing—seldom with textual support—that everything that happens in the play is the direct result of her indefatigable conniving (“All’s Well That Ends Well and ‘All Seems Well’”). 31. “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” Signs 7 (Spring 1982), 530–31. While MacKinnon’s comment offers a useful gloss on Helena’s predicament, it can hardly be taken as universally true; female sexuality is surely far too powerful, multifaceted, and complex to suffer reduction to the simple task of attracting and pleasing men. 32. James Hillman suggests that Helena never gives the slightest indication that she cares whether Bertram desires her or not; she wishes to construct herself out of her construction of him and so aspires only to render him powerless to reject the image she wishes to project onto him (William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays [New York: Twayne, 1993], 67). Although I agree that Helena positions Bertram as self-substantiating Other, I would argue that her alliance with Diana bespeaks a need not merely to stand in for but to become the object of Bertram’s desire, to present herself at play’s end as, among other things, a body bearing physical evidence of its antecedent desirability. 33. “The statement, ‘I am a man,’ . . . at most can mean no more than, ‘I’m like he whom I recognize to be a man, and so recognize myself as being such.’ In the last resort, these various formulas are to be understood only in reference to the truth of ‘I is an other,’” Jacques Lacan, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 23. 34. Lynda E. Boose discusses this homology in her stunning essay “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 199–200; also Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” 126. 35. For a superb psychoanalytic account of Bertram’s fear of Helena’s engulfing maternalism, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 79–86. 36. “But only the girl with whom one has not grown up from childhood, and become accustomed to, can ever be to us in the truly sexual sense, a real girl. That is to say, she alone can possess these powerful stimuli to the sense of sexual desirability, never developed in people one has grown unconsciously used to, which are essential to the making of a real girl,” in Sex and Marriage (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977), 42. 37. Ruth Nevo contends that the Countess is “rather more than half in love with her son,” and “since she cannot have a husband in her son, she will identify with the girl who would be his wife, and so transform her love for Bertram into a double maternal solicitude” (“Motive and Meaning in All’s Well That Ends Well,” in “Fanned and Winnowed Opinions”: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, ed. John W. Malion and Thomas H. Pendleton [London: Methuen, 1987], 33, 35). My argument is closer to that of Adelman, who identifies a “binding maternal power” in the Countess which Helena enacts and extends (Suffocating Mothers, 79–80). 38. For a brilliant discussion of the oedipal conflict between Bertram and the King, see Richard P Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies, 35–45.


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39. Nevo also notes the strangeness of “mother” within the menu of lovers’ epithets, “Motive and Meaning in All’s Well That Ends Well,” 37–38. 40. Other critics have noted the Clown’s role as Bertram’s double (see, for instance, Snyder, “‘The King’s Not Here,’” 23–24), though none that I know of has argued that the parallel encompasses an ambivalent attitude toward Helena. 41. The way in which male initiation rites tend to exclude women and often require the reception of a wound that constitutes a male vulva has been noted by, among others, Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), esp. 21–40; and Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (Glencoe, N.Y.: Free Press, 1954; rpt. New York: Collier), esp. 90–121. 42. See, for instance, Ornstein, Shakespeare’s Comedies, 183. 43. David Haley’s recent study, Shakespeare’s Courtly Mirror: Reflexivity and Praxis in All’s Well That Ends Well (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1993), offers perhaps the most thorough defense of Bertram, arguing that his character can be understood only in the context of aristocratic “praxis” and not individual psychology. Haley argues that Bertram, like Hal, becomes the heroic nobleman he was destined to be from the outset: “[T]he playwright has fashioned the character primarily with a view to the character’s heroic end. Bertram must be conceived as the nobleman he will ultimately be” (218). Haley’s confidence in Bertram’s maturation—and concomitant elision of his inadequacies—strikes me as problematic, as does his reification of an heroic code that the play seems to destabilize. Although Haley resists psychoanalytic interpretations, his notion of “mirroring” lends itself to Lacanian translation: Bertram must identify with a culturally imposed image that allows him to signify within the cultural (courtly) spectacle, must fit himself to the screen that enables capture by the gaze. That such identification constitutes a misrecognition seems apparent from the insubstantiality of the models to which Bertram is subject: the militaristic flummery of Parolles and the nostalgically mythologized courtliness of his father, the Count. 44. Robert Smallwood, “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1989, Part II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (Winter 1990), 494. 45. Steve Vineberg, “Problem Plays,” Threepenny Review 52 (Spring 1993), 32. 46. Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today (London: Women’s Press, 1988), 81. 47. Rutter, Clamorous Voices, 88. 48. Rutter, Clamorous Voices, 88. 49. J. L. Styan, All’s Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester UP, 1984), 72. 50. See Price for an account of Houseman’s staging (The Unfortunate Comedy, 67), and Smallwood for a description of Kyle’s (“Shakespeare at Stratford-uponAvon, 1989,” 494). 60. Alice Doesn’t, 99, 83. 61. See Neely, Broken Nuptials, 73, and Hodgdon, “The Making of Virgins and Mothers,” 60. 62. Alice Doesn’t, 153, 157. 63. For a helpful discussion of the King’s fistula, see E. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992), 293–98. Surveying contemporaneous medical treatises, Hoeniger concludes that


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Shakespeare’s audience would have assumed that the King’s fistula was in ano. Hoeniger believes that the cured King’s reference to “this healthful hand, whose banished sense / Thou hast repealed” indicates that the wound might actually have been located in his hand, as though Shakespeare were playing a joke on an audience inclined to believe that the fistula was in ano. This single line, however, does not provide strong enough evidence that Shakespeare wished to contradict the audience’s assumption. The Fisher King “had been crippled by a spear-thrust in the thighs. It seems clear that the words usually translated ‘wounded through his two thighs’ were intended to mean ‘wounded between his two thighs.’ In plain language, he was emasculated. The Fisher King is impotent and his land is threatened with ruin,” Robert Cavendish, King Arthur and the Grail: The Arthurian Legends and Their Meaning (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), 140. 64. See Styan, All’s Well That Ends Well, 25, 52. 65. Smallwood, “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1989,” 494. 66. Guthrie’s production offered a purely mystical example of faith-healing. See Styan, All’s Well That Ends Well, 54.


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ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY q

It seems overly arbitrary to suggest that, one decade into this new century, a new and fundamentally different view of All’s Well has emerged. Nonetheless, it is safe to make a general observation about Shakespeare studies as a whole and note some developing trends related to the play in particular. One shift that seems to be occurring in the early twenty-first century is the decline of New Historicism. This approach to literary texts has dominated Shakespeare studies since the 1980s, but there seems to be a growing sense of exhaustion surrounding it now. Though New Historicist approaches have by no means disappeared nor are they likely to any time soon, new critical enthusiasm surrounds an approach to Shakespeare’s texts often labeled as presentism. Loosely, this approach champions studies of Shakespeare that celebrate and examine the playwright’s existence today, rather than trying to understand his works intimately as products of their time. Although historical contextualization must and does have its place, the increasing focus on contemporary issues and media marks a new approach after decades spent in the archives. It is not clear, however, how All’s Well That Ends Well will be treated by this kind of approach. After all, the play has no major film adaptations at this time and is far less frequently staged than many other Shakespeare works. It lacks the kind of hardedged social issues that make plays such as Othello or The Merchant of Venice so immediately compelling to our time. We will have to wait to see how the critical destiny of All’s Well That Ends Well is altered in the coming decades. The first decade of the century has nonetheless seen a sustained interest in All’s Well That Ends Well, and a respectable body of criticism has been produced, though nothing in particular seems to radically set this criticism apart from work done in the last several decades of the twentieth century. Still, the quality and quantity of the critical attention are impressive. Gary Waller’s 2007 New Critical Essays on All’s Well That Ends Well, for example, brought together various stimulating and original interpretations of the play (Helen Wilcox’s essay, included in this section, is from Waller’s volume). Some themes, though, that have attracted the interest of more than one critic include issues of maternity and gynecology (see the bibliography for details on works by Moncrief, Harris, and 203


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Osherow); religion, part of a distinct interest in “spiritual Shakespeare” (Wilcox, Hunt); performance (White), though again, this is limited to a relatively small selection of stage productions and the BBC television adaptation from the early 1980s. There has been, of course, a continuation of the historically minded criticism so prevalent in Shakespeare studies recently (Reilly), and fresh takes on gender issues in the play (Howard). There has even been a fascinating example of biographical criticism (R. Brian Parker) connecting Shakespeare’s own possible marital issues with the themes of the play. Overall, we can see how far All’s Well That Ends Well has come since its critical ostracism and then mistreatment and dismissal at the hands of so many writers over the centuries. The rise of theory and the rise of All’s Well That Ends Well have been intimately and unsurprisingly connected. After all, both revel in the complex and the indeterminate, the fascination and frustrations of a puzzle that cannot be clearly or adequately solved.

2007—Helen Wilcox. From New Critical Essays on All’s Well That Ends Well Wilcox teaches at the Bangor University in Wales and has published extensively. Her most recent work is on the Cambridge edition of George Herbert’s poems. In this essay, Wilcox evaluates minor examples of All’s Well That Ends Well’s religious character (the use of spiritually loaded words or biblical allusion in the dialogue) alongside more striking examples (themes of redemption, resurrection, and miracle). Though Wilcox cautions against finding direct answers to the play’s religious identity, the assertion that this is a powerfully spiritual play seems irresistible.

This essay examines the presence of religious language, action, tradition and controversy in All’s Well That Ends Well, with a view to making a claim for the play’s substantial undertones of spirituality. From the play’s opening scene onwards, the language of secular desire and sacred devotion are interwoven, such that Helena worships at Bertram’s shrine and saves “relics” of his presence as he departs for the court. Helena’s subsequent success at court in curing the King of France is seen by Lafew as miraculous, but the play focuses on the difficulty of interpreting human actions: is the “help of heaven” indeed manifested in the work of “earthly actors” (2.1.152, 2.2.23)? A consideration of the complex religious concerns implicit in the play’s events will alert us to its dilemmas over freedom and agency. These issues also relate closely to the intense doctrinal debates of the early seventeenth century. Not only does the play reopen the question


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of miracles, but it also poses the problem of the relationship between words and things—or between riddles and actions—in a version of the Reformation arguments between the biblical and the sacramental. In addition, why is it that Helena sets out on her intensely Catholic pilgrimage towards the shrine of St. James at Compostella, and to what extent is her subsequent course of action endorsed by the gift of grace which was so esteemed in the Protestant tradition? The play’s climax involves two more apparent miracles: the reappearance of Helena as though resurrected, and the mysterious pregnancy of a supposedly virgin mother. If Bertram is finally moved to “love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (5.3.314), then yet another miracle will have occurred in anticipation, extending into the promised time after the end of the play. This essay suggests, therefore, that it is justifiable to refer to All’s Well as Shakespeare’s “miracle play,” not in order to imply a reliance upon medieval dramatic traditions, but rather to assert that devotion, faith and redemption are among its chief concerns. What kinds of religious language are employed in All’s Well? The opening scene immediately provides examples of devotional vocabulary in use, as in the Countess’s farewell to her son: “Be thou bless’d . . . What heaven more will . . . my prayers pluck down” (1.1.59, 66–7). This is not acutely sacred language, but demonstrates what might be termed a litany of parenthood, in which the mother as intermediary prays for blessing on her son and envisages for her own part a dynamic religiousness. She will “pluck” gifts from heaven, and the hint of desperation in this chosen verb turns out to be not unwarranted with regard to Bertram’s later actions. In her maternal relationship with Helena, later in the first act of the play, the Countess again plays this actively prayerful role, though in blessing Helena the verb chosen by the older woman is the more conventional “pray” rather than “pluck” (1.3.249). Like the Abbess of Ephesus (Aemilia) in Comedy of Errors, the Countess depicts herself as a kind of abbess in her own estate, remaining within the home and away from the world of the court, practising a life of necessary prayer and contemplation rather than of action. In the case of Helena, the Countess has a less daunting supplicatory task on her hands than in her duty of prayer for her own son. On arrival at court, Helena herself declares that, in her plan to effect a cure of the King, she may be considered a “minister”—albeit the “weakest”—of “He that of the greatest works is finisher” (2.1.137). Helena’s reference to her own weakness not only reveals a conventional modesty with regard to her gender and social position, but also indicates her knowledge of the biblical precedent for her actions: according to St. Paul, “God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty” (1 Cor. 1:27). She goes on to make direct reference to the bible as the authority for her apparent audacity in believing that she can help the King: “so holy writ in babes hath judgment shown” (II.i.138). Shakespeare probably had in mind here the Old Testament “babe” Daniel who, when still a child, was found “ten times better” in wisdom and judgment by King


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Nebuchadnezzar than all the wise men in his realm (Daniel 1:20). The parallel with the situation in the French court, where the “most learned doctors” have given up any hope of the King’s recovery, is unmistakeable. Helena’s language continues to be explicitly religious and it is she who first introduces the term “miracle” to refer to the promised healing of the King, likened to “miracles” that “have by the great’st been denied.” The source of her confidence is divine aid or “greatest Grace lending grace”, for which she claims simply to function as a conduit (2.1.141, 160). When the King has indeed been cured, Helena denies having had an active role in his recovery, insisting that “Heaven hath through me restor’d the king to health.” Those around her at the court acknowledge that they perceive in the King’s transformation the “very hand of heaven” and confirm that there is indeed “some blessed spirit” in her (2.3.63, 30, 2.1.175). How seriously can we take this kind of religious language in the context of the play and its times? Helena herself evokes our dilemma by commenting twice on the misinterpretation of things sacred and profane. In private she asserts that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.212–3), introducing the strong strain of sceptical self-sufficiency found in the play. In public debate with the King, however, she turns the argument around: It is not so with Him who all things knows As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows; But most it is presumption in us when The help of heaven we count the act of men. (2.1.149–52) We who read or see All’s Well are clearly among those who are forced to “square our guess by shows,” both as flawed humans in a complex world and as an audience in the theatre, puzzling out the meaning of the play. However, the problem for us as we attempt to understand this tragicomedy is the awkwardly reversible nature of the interpretative strategy put forward here by Helena. How can we distinguish the “help of heaven” from the “act of men”—or rather, which is the metaphor and which the real event? During the action of the play, the remedies for ill health and lost love may be perceived to derive from either heavenly or human intervention; both interpretations are signalled in the play. Those who tend to emphasise human actions and to deny miracles are regularly reminded, by Helena in particular, that it is a mistake to dismiss the possibility of supernatural intervention in human affairs. On the other hand, if a providential or miraculous understanding of effective action is favoured, then it becomes all too easy to dismiss individual creativity and human responsibility, particularly when these qualities are exercised by Helena—a woman, and a mere doctor’s daughter at that—as she first wins and then regains her beloved Bertram.1 How can we know the source of an individual’s agency? The debate is a very real one


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in the play, affecting not only Helena but also Bertram, Parolles and Diana, and the wider social, political and military worlds that they inhabit. Religious language in All’s Well is not, therefore, a conventional or empty vehicle but a sign of deep-seated controversy both in the play and in early seventeenth-century England. When Helena has cured the King, the comments of Lafew grumpily refer to an ongoing argument between traditionalists and those who would deny the influence of supernatural powers: They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (2.3.1–6) These words invoke the major uncertainties of Shakespeare’s era: the relationship between the old religion and the new, between ancient truths and the new scientific knowledge, and between an inexplicable fate and the familiarity of individual action. Like Donne, Lafew is suspicious of the “new Philosophy” which “cals all in doubt”; like Sir Thomas Browne, he would rather submit himself to a divine mystery than deny its impact by explaining it. “Wee doe too narrowly define the power of God,” Browne pointed out, by “restraining it to our capacities.”2 At this turning point in the play, it would seem that the old styles of believing and knowing have the upper hand. Medical science seems to have been put in its place by supernatural influences, and a new Saint Helen appears to be in the making, with her power to effect miracles and her almost sacramental embodiment of a “heavenly effect in an earthly actor” (2.3.23). However, we are soon led to question Lafew’s reliability as an interpreter of events. He approvingly reads out the ballad ascribing the King’s cure to heaven, but a few moments later, in the very same scene, he completely misunderstands Helena’s dealings with the young Lords offered to her in marriage. An audience quickly begins to wonder how far Lafew’s sense of the nature of events should be trusted, and becomes disconcertingly aware of the slippery quality of religious assurances in the play. Multiple uncertainties in the area of religious language have thus already been introduced before we are even half-way through the play. Is the vocabulary of faith being used accurately by the characters to whom it is assigned, or with more enthusiasm than reason? The boundary between the literal and the figurative use of this terminology is difficult to discern, especially in an age when, as Donne put it, God himself was perceived as both “a literall God ” and “a figurative, a metaphoricall God too.”3 Is the divine in All’s Well an image of the human, or vice versa? Does Shakespeare’s use of some aspects of sacred discourse signify the play’s response to contemporary controversies and, if so, are they concerned


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generally with faith versus scepticism—”miracles” as opposed to the “modern and familiar”—or with more specific differences between Catholicism and reformed belief? Let us examine each of these questions in turn. Religious language is rarely used with serious accuracy and consistency in All’s Well by characters other than the Countess. Even Helena, who appears to take her heavenly role seriously at the beginning of the play and later chooses the way of a pilgrim, uses devotional vocabulary more frequently with reference to her very earthly love for Bertram than for the adoration of God: “Indian-like, / Religious in mine error,” she “adore[s] / The sun that looks upon his worshipper” (1.3.199–201). Helena’s complete but unnoticed devotion to Bertram is expressed in terms of pagan worship, erroneous but all-consuming. Towards the end of the play, still “religious” in her misdirected love, Helena refers to her heavenly “fate” in yet more questionable circumstances, as she plans the bed-trick and asserts her God-given role as “dower” to Diana (4.4.19–20). The specifically providential gloss on the play’s eventual comic pattern emerges solely from the lips of the Countess. As she contemplates Bertram’s folly and cruelty in rejecting Helena, she asks: What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive, Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice. (3.4.25–9) As matters proceed, however, it is not so much the “prayers” of Helena that appear to “reprieve” the “unworthy” Bertram, as her ingenuity and secular (or even “Indian-like”) devotion. On the other hand, as the play’s optimistically redemptive title reminds us, the very principle of Bertram’s salvation from the “wrath” of justice is a spiritual one. The concept of loving a flawed individual and giving him a second chance, even though he may not seem worthy of it, is fundamental to the “divine comedy” of the New Testament as well as to the final scene of All’s Well. The play’s general framework of spiritual consciousness manifests itself in the enthusiastic dialogue of characters like Lafew (as we have seen in his celebration of miracles) and, even more strikingly, the clown Lavatch. When we first encounter him, Lavatch comes up with some rather predictable jokes on matrimony as a means of repentance, clarified by the Countess in her wry comment that he is likely to repent his marriage sooner than his “wickedness” (1.3.38).4 Throughout the play, Lavatch’s mode of wit is one which toys with life’s spiritual dimension. He points out to Helena that there are but two things that keep the Countess from being well: “One, that she’s not in heaven . . . The other, that she’s in


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earth” (2.4.10–12). The pun on physical and spiritual health is simple enough, highlighting the clown’s ironic otherworldly meaning that to be on earth at all is to be unwell. However, this wit functions well because it is in a dramatic context in which we have already been alerted to the close, and contested, relationship between the human and the divine. Later Lavatch spars verbally with Lafew and, having yet again introduced heaven and hell into the conversation, rejects the service of the devil, that master who “ever keeps a good fire”: “I am for the house with the narrow gate” (4.5.46–8). This reference to Christ’s statement in the Sermon on the Mount is quite remarkable for its (mock) confidence in an age when the quotation was more often used as a threat than a promise: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:14). Although overtly providential language is rare in the play, fundamentally hopeful religious vocabulary and assumptions occur frequently. The fact that the wit of All’s Well keeps touching religion like a sore tooth suggests that, despite the relative lack of serious doctrinal discussion in the play, there is a consciously spiritual context for its characters’ actions. If religious language can function in the play to signify sincerity, enthusiasm, devotion (in the widest sense) and wit, then what can we discern from this of the play’s “devotional” centre? Is it the love of God that makes the world of All’s Well go round, or is it sexual desire? In the 2004–5 RSC production, Helena’s selection of Bertram from among the courtiers was staged as a courtly dance in which the men whirled around with ever-increasing speed, suggesting not only their unease with the ritual but also the urgency of her desire. Indeed, the “miraculous” cure of the King by Helena only comes into consideration because of Helena’s love for Bertram which leads her to seek favour at the court. This inspirational love, “confessed” by her to the Countess in quasi-liturgical manner “on my knee, before high heaven” (1.3.187–8), anticipates by two centuries Keats’s commitment to the “holiness of the Heart’s affections.”5 The idea of devotion in sexual love is echoed in the wooing scene between Bertram and Diana; inspired by the overtones of Diana’s name, the references to love as “holycruel” are classical in origin, but the play is never far from the hope of a Christian heaven. Bertram vows, with blasphemous effect, that to be in Diana’s bed will be “heaven on earth”; Diana adds, out of his hearing, that when he realises that he has found his wife Helena there instead of Diana, he should indeed “live long to thank both Heaven and me” (4.2.32, 67). The term “grace” is also used in All’s Well in ways which draw attention to its rich multivalence, with meanings which include physical attractiveness, social dignity and spiritual redemption. Helena represents “grace” to the King, primarily because she can “breathe life into a stone,” a phrase echoing the power of Jesus to turn his followers into “living stones” (1 Peter 2:4–5). Christ-like, Helena reflects the “greatest Grace” in saving the King and offering him hope of new life. However, she is simultaneously a female beauty of whom Lafew is obviously


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aware in sexual terms; bringing her into the King’s presence, he likens himself to Pandarus, “Cressid’s uncle / That dare leave two together” (2.1.72, 59, 97–8). In the extended final scenes, the ambiguity of grace is again introduced. When the disgraced Parolles petitions Lafew “to bring me in some grace” (5.2.45), the phrase is elaborately shown to refer to both courtly favour and religious salvation; grace doubles as social preferment and the gift of God. By contrast, when Bertram is brought face to face with Diana he refers to her “modern grace” (5.3.216), a gift which appears to be a very earthly sexual attractiveness. The “herb of grace” (4.5.14) apparently has a flavour of the royal court and the Florentine bedroom as well as of the bible. Despite its deliberate and occasionally disorienting mixture of the social and the sacred, All’s Well does contain certain scenes which make use of religious language specifically in order to raise doctrinal controversy. One of the play’s first references to prayer is heard in Parolles’s mocking farewell to Helena after their extended discussion of virginity. Among the comic ironies of the play is the fact that this man, who relegates prayer to the status of an optional activity for hours of “leisure” (1.1.209), later becomes the “hoodwinked” wretch reduced to the desperate need to “pray, pray, pray” for his life (4.1.81, 78). Parolles, whose “soul” is said to be “his clothes” (2.5.43–4), is forced into a very public “recantation” of his jaunty self-confidence as well as a betrayal of any loyalty he might once have had to Bertram and their fellow-soldiers. Bertram himself twice undergoes a “recantation” (2.3.186) with respect to Helena, whom he has twice rejected, first at the court when she claims him, and soon afterwards as he runs away from her when she has become his wife. Indeed, the play’s action is built around the men’s public rejection of their former beliefs, in spectacles of confrontation and confession which are secular shadows of the religious recantations so familiar in post-Reformation England. Is this, then, another sense in which All’s Well is a “miracle play”? In this meaning of the phrase, the wonder is not the apparently miraculous curing of the King but rather a broader and wittier sense—the amazement felt at the recognition of men’s brittle loyalties, whose sudden recantations can yet lead to repentance and forgiveness in the end. The specific context in which the play is set is Catholic Europe—France and Italy—but Shakespeare’s mental universe, as ever, is that of his own contemporary England in the midst of the religious tensions of the early Jacobean era. Why else would Lavatch refer in passing to the disagreements between “young Charbon the puritan and old Poysam the papist”, whose hearts are “sever’d in religion” (1.3.51–3) even though they are united in being cuckolded by their wives? This ribald comment functions primarily as an attack on women’s unfaithfulness, but at the same time it mocks both religious groups (on account of their dietary habits) and highlights the similarity of men in spite of their doctrinal differences. The ongoing controversy in England about the significance of the ]lost in the sacrament of Holy Communion—sacrifice or memorial, transubstantiation or


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symbolism, object of worship or culinary item—is touched upon in Parolles’s blatantly false vow to his interrogators, “I’ll take the sacrament on’t, how and which way you will” (4.3.135–6). His reference to “how and which way” flippantly evokes the debate about whether to receive the sacrament kneeling or sitting, as well as the question of receiving communion in one or two kinds, the bread alone or both bread and wine. His final phrase, “you will,” suggests his own lack of interest in the debate, thereby undermining any implied seriousness in his vow. The very fact that the characters who mock these doctrinal issues are the clown (Lavatch) and the unreliable witness (Parolles) might alert us to the necessity of taking them seriously in the play’s larger scheme. Helena’s pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostella, a major centre of devotion for Catholics, is pivotal not only to the working of the plot of All’s Well, but also to the audience’s perception of her character. Relics, as found and adored at such shrines, feature in Helena’s language in the opening scene, long before she has decided to embark upon her pilgrimage. Helena laments Bertram’s departure for the court, and comments: “But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous heart / Must sanctify his relics” (1.1.96–7). Is her heart “idolatrous” because it adores at the shrine of Cupid, or is the Catholic practice of sanctifying relics itself the object of criticism here? Since the pilgrimage by Helena is only ever completed in a reported fiction, the only (metaphorical) “relics” left in the final scene of the play are the King’s memories of the seemingly-dead Helena, which he resolves to bury “deeper than oblivion” in an act of forgiveness towards Bertram (5.3.24–5). Is this a hint that Catholic devotional practices should ultimately be left behind, whether in the world of the play or in the Jacobean context in which it was written and performed? It is certainly possible to interpret the play along these lines. Like the closely related tragicomedy, Measure for Measure, All’s Well creates an image of a society which turns its back on the imprisoning forces of the convent, pilgrimages, fasting, devotion to relics, and idolatrous reliance on physical signs of spiritual reality. The frequent use of the word “grace” in All’s Well, though ambiguously poised on the boundary of the sacred and the secular, would have been notable to an audience alert to the key importance of this term in the theological debates of the period. In Protestant theology, particularly that of Calvin, human beings are seen as utterly dependent on divine grace, a gift which will simply “drop from above”, undeserved, on the heads of those who are saved.6 The play’s apparent movement towards reformed theology, the faith of words and grace rather than sacrament and action, seems to be confirmed by the increasing emphasis on words in the closing scenes of All’s Well. When Bertram eventually capitulates and accepts that he has been “won” again by Helena, the most important evidence is the fact that the words of his apparently impossible riddle have been followed. The “letter” of the law has been fulfilled by Helena, and Bertram is born again, “doubly won” (5.3.312) as though by birth and then


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the rebirth of baptismal conversion (Rom. 6:3–11). This suggests a conclusion to the play which is redemptive in a strictly Protestant sense. However, things are not really so clear cut in the theological realm of All’s Well. Helena’s proof—“There is your ring” (5.3.308)—is a reminder of how important signs are, too, in the play’s conclusion. The ring, like an element in the Catholic Mass, is worth more than its own created nature: it is transformed into an emblem signifying history, identity, loyalty, honesty. The physical sign speaks louder than words. In the 2005 production of All’s Well at Lancaster castle, the ring was passed around the courtroom as evidence, being examined and touched by members of the audience as well as the King and assembled courtiers. As the King reminds Bertram, Helena “call’d the saints to surety / That she would never put it from her finger, / Unless she gave it to yourself in bed” (5.3.108–10). The power of these lines is partly that of folk-tale, but it also awakens strong parallels with Catholicism, a tradition more sacramental and emblematic than verbal. The ring is a “token” of relief (5.3.85), and its powers are confirmed by reference to the “saints.” Words alone do not seem to be sufficient, but the ring—associated with the intercessions of the saints—ensures Helena’s identity and confirms the truth of her story. Faith in the word is, indeed, undermined throughout the play by the name given to the least trustworthy character, the cowardly Parolles, the literal translation of whose name from the French is, of course, “words.” There are also serious objections to the hypothesis that the end of the play upholds a Protestant vision of all-powerful divine grace, since the redemption brought about by Helena does not “drop from above” on to passively accepting heads, but is won by active intervention closer to the good works favoured by Catholic theology. However, it is perhaps beyond the wit of a Jesuit to label a bed-trick as an instance of good works—and so the religious dilemmas of this equivocal play go on. It might be possible to argue that this mixture of religious attitudes, expressed through doctrinal vocabulary from a variety of traditions and sources, simply forms the texture of the world constructed by Shakespeare in All’s Well. In other words, could it be that the fascination with religious devotion remains a superficial aspect of the drama, disguising a core which is thoroughly secular? The language of independence from providence—as in Helena’s assertion that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie” (1.1.212)—is very persuasive. Helena does indeed create a solution to her dilemma through her own resources of mind and body, as well as those of a group of other women. The play is undoubtedly a triumph of sisterhood over both rank and sex, though we may wonder whether the prize of the reluctant husband was really worth all the effort. Nevertheless, there is no escape from the prevailing religiousness even of the women’s plotting; the bed-trick is described by Helena as “Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact” (3.7.47). The specific references to sin, and the paradoxical structure of this line and those that precede it, are echoed in Diana’s soliloquy spoken after she has


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apparently agreed to sleep with Bertram (4.2.71–6). Her self-justification partly depends upon teasing wordplay on lying and dying, and flimsy generalisations concerning gender and nationality. However, she also reasons out her decision in consciously religious terms—”I think’t no sin / To cozen him that would unjustly win” (4.2.75–6)—before complying with Helena’s wishes and tricking Bertram in the “pitchy night” (4.4.24). Sin or no sin, the bed-trick is a clear reminder of the real basis of any supposed self-sufficiency in the play. In a brief dialogue between two French courtiers before the capture and gulling of Parolles—an event which parallels in the military world the tricking of Bertram in the amorous one—Bertram is said to have “perverted a young gentlewoman” and “this night he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour.” The response of the fellow-courtier to this statement is of major significance to the mood of the whole play: “Now, God delay our rebellion! As we are ourselves, what things are we!” (4.3.13–9). The context of this comment makes it clear that it is not spoken in wistful admiration of individual human potential, but offers a spur-of-the-moment lament for human weakness and folly. The phrase “what things we are” anticipates the reduction of Parolles by the end of the play to “simply the thing I am” (4.3.323). The play’s moments of metaphysical contemplation have the effect of reducing human nature to its bare essentials, almost the “unaccommodated man” of Lear’s bleak vision. The sin that the French courtier had in mind when facing up to what “we are ourselves”—that is, “our rebellion”—is the original sin inherited from Adam and Eve who rebelled in Eden. The courtier’s exclamation reveals an assumption that the “things we are,” though flawed, will always be understood as spiritual as well as physical. The play simply does not allow the separation of the secular from the religious, whether in love, loss, vulnerability or achievement. The Duke of Florence, engaged in a war which provides the setting for the later part of the play, is said to have a “holy quarrel,” and Florentine requests for military assistance from France are termed “borrowing prayers” (3.1.4,9). Even in jest, Parolles delights in the play’s all-prevailing spirituality when he will not allow that Bertram alone is his “lord and master” (2.3.241). Parolles is the servant of at least two masters, God and the devil, according to the perceptive Lafew as well as the mock-devout Parolles himself. Later in the play, the quick-witted clown Lavatch shows his familiarity with the bible as he talks of herbs, quipping that he is “no great Nebuchadnezzar, sir; I have not much skill in grass” (4.5.18–19). The reference to the Old Testament king who was made to eat grass until he acknowledged the power of God over the inhabitants of the earth (Daniel 4:28–37) recalls the scepticism of the King of France when faced with Helena’s claims of divine assistance. Shallow and temporary though these playfully religious exchanges may seem, they reflect the deeper issues debated by the play. They hint at its prevailing spirituality and occur with striking regularity, filling out the more overtly religious aspects of the plot itself, such as miracles, pilgrimages, recantations and conversions. The light-hearted


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quibbles keep the audience simultaneously in multiple worlds: biblical and fictional, Jacobean controversy and continental devotion, all at once. The final moments of All’s Well appear to restore the belief in miracles asserted and debated after Helena’s triumphant curing of the King. The extended last scene is a sequence of apparent miracles: Diana the virgin who is no maid, Helena the dead wife who returns to life, and the riddle which is fulfilled without Bertram’s realisation of his involvement in its resolution. The biblical precedents lying behind the first two seeming miracles are the paradox of the virgin Mary, mother and maid, and the resurrections of Lazarus and Christ (Matthew 1:22–5, John 11:37–45, John 20:11–18). The Marian parallels in Helena’s situation, as she turns the words of Bertram’s riddle into flesh by her conception of their child, remind the audience of the miracle of the incarnation and its potential to overturn the death sentence of original sin. The “meaning” of Helena’s revelation is miraculous: the restorative effect of love can transform the “dead,” spiritually or physically, into sources of new life (5.3.300–2). Helena is both Christ-like in her resurrection and her power to redeem Bertram, and Mary-like in her (pseudo)virginity and the echoes of the incarnation. Indeed, the cases of both Diana and Helena evoke the Catholic tradition of devotion to the Blessed Virgin, raising anew the possibility of recusant echoes in the play. However, the fact that Helena is, after all, not a virgin but a loyal and chaste wife could well be seen as a compromise between the cult of the Virgin Mary and the Protestant commitment to companionate marriage.7 Once again, though, the course of the play evades any neat resolution of its doctrinal dilemmas. In the first scene, Helena famously engages in a long and witty debate about virginity, during which, ironically, it is the unreliable Parolles who expresses the Protestant objections to virginity, a state valued and encouraged by the convents of Catholic tradition. By the play’s conclusion, Helena’s purity and pilgrim-like devotion have been tainted by the false story of her death. The play’s ambivalence about the rights and wrongs of the virgin state persists to the end. However, what is certain is that a practical and secular virginity—in the form of the alliance of Diana and Helena—has triumphed. At the start of the play, Helena had asked for advice from Parolles as to “how virgins might blow up men” (1.1.119–20), and the closing scene shows both Bertram and Parolles thoroughly “undermined” by their female counterparts. This is the social “miracle” with which the play ends. The biblical model for the third amazing turn of events in the conclusion, Bertram’s apparent repentance, is the parable of the Prodigal Son, in which the profligate son returns home to his father’s house and is forgiven (Luke 15:11–32). Back at the court of his substitute father and patriarchal monarch, the King of France, Bertram indeed finds forgiveness, though unexpectedly it comes primarily from his wife—miraculously returned to life and pregnant with his child—and from his mother, the Countess. The story of the Prodigal


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Son is rewritten in the final act of All’s Well, to fit into a dramatic context in which women are the prime movers and vessels of providence. Their consciousness of this role is an important part of the play’s spirituality: as Helena says when urging the King to submit to her care, “Of heaven, not me, make an experiment” (2.1.154). Recalling the question implied in the title of this essay, it does indeed seem appropriate to call All’s Well a sort of “miracle play”, since its prevailing concern—both implicit and explicit—is with the miracle of redemption and the divinely-instigated priority of life over death. With its rich texture of religious language and references, the play depicts a world in which even the most sceptical are located in a spiritual framework of thought, speech and action. One of its predominant concerns is devotion in interconnectedly sacred and secular senses: devotion to Helena (by the King, Lafew, the Countess, Diana and the widow) as a perceived agent of providence, and the devotion of Helena to the fulfilment of her love for Bertram. Both kinds of devotion are subjected to considerable questioning and assault during the course of the play, and by the conclusion neither has been thoroughly rewarded. There is no unequivocal sense of a proper theological position in the play: pilgrimages, relics and virginity are used but never completely endorsed, and the idea of commitment to faith rather than works, or to the word rather than the “thing itself ”, is also challenged by the events of the final scene. There is, in addition, no easy assurance of the rightness of Helena’s confidence in Bertram, as the King’s epilogue reminds us with its repeat of the provisional “If ” which tempers Bertram’s last speech. We leave the theatre with the King’s line, “All is well ended if this suit be won” (Epilogue 2, my italics) echoing in our memories. In the end it is humbling to realise that, as an audience, we, too, are regularly tested by the play’s language and action, particularly with regard to our sense of the spiritual and the miraculous. Through the events and the debates of All’s Well, our confidence in the interpretation of heavenly influence in earthly affairs (and vice versa) is repeatedly buffeted. We are asked to accept on trust the least conclusive of all Shakespeare’s happy endings, and to believe that it has ended “well.” As Paulina asserts in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, while preparing to perform another theatrical miracle in bringing the statue of the “dead” Hermione to life: “It is requir’d / You do awake your faith.” A “miracle play” like The Winter’s Tale or All’s Well tests the “faith” of the audience in miracles, both theatrical and sacred. Can Bertram really be redeemed? Is Helena a genuine agent of the “help of heaven” (2.1.152)? The predominance of “If ” in the closing scene suggests that the play is an exploration of the potential for the miraculous and the redemptive, rather than a celebration of it. But whichever position one takes—believing or sceptical, Catholic or Protestant, sacred or social—the religious quality of the play remains one of its prevailing characteristics. Perhaps the only unequivocally devotional statement in the whole play, rising above doctrinal, social and gender


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differences, is one not contained in its action but in its title—referring not to the drama, but to the deferred judgment of heaven. NOTES 1. Lisa Jardine, “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines: ‘These are old paradoxes,’” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 11. 2. John Donne, “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World,” The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985), 335; Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1.27, The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 95. 3. John Donne, Expostulation 19, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1975), 99. 4. For the religious and bawdy wordplay in this scene, see Peggy Muñoz Simonds, “Sacred and Sexual Motifs in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 48. 5. Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 36–7. 6. See George Herbert, “Grace”, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 60–1, and Romans 5:15–21. 7. See Alison Findlay, “‘One that’s dead is quick’: Virgin Re-birth in All’s Well That Ends Well,” in Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama, ed. Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).


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Ray, Nicholas. “‘’Twas mine, ’twas Helen’s’”: Rings of Desire in All’s Well, That Ends Well.” All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays. Gary Waller, ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2007: 183–94. Reilly, Terry. “All’s Well, That Ends Well and the 1604 Controversy Concerning the Courts of Wards and Liveries.” All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays. Gary Waller, ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2007: 209–21. Ryan, Kiernan. “‘Where Hope Is Coldest’: All’s Well That Ends Well.” Spiritual Shakespeares. Ewan Fernie, ed. London: Routledge, 2005: 28–49. Schwarz, Kathryn. “‘My Intents Are Fix’d’: Constant Will in All’s Well That Ends Well.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 58, no. 2 (2007 Summer): p. 200–27. Sullivan, Garret A. “‘Be This Sweet Helen’s Knell, and Now Forget Her’: Forgetting, Memory, and Identity in All’s Well That Ends Well.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 50, no. 1 (1999 Spring): 51–69. Taunton, Nina. Fictions of Old Age in Early Modern Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007. Waller, Gary, ed. All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. Wheeler, Richard P. Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. White, Bob. “All’s Well as Television: the 1980 Moshinsky Production.” All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays. Gary Waller, ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2007: 234–47. Wilcox, Helen. “Shakespeare’s Miracle Play? Religion in All’s Well, That Ends Well.” All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays. Gary Waller, ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2007: 140–55. Williams, Deanne. “All’s Well, That Ends Well and the Art of Retrograde Motion.” All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays. Gary Waller, ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2007: 98–111.


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Acknowledgments q


E.M.W. Tillyard, “All’s Well That Ends Well.” From Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (Chatto & Windus, 1951). Copyright © the literary estate of E.M.W. Tillyard. George Wilson Knight, “The Third Eye: An Essay on All’s Well That Ends Well. From The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1958). Mary Free, “All’s Well That Ends Well as Noncomic Comedy.” From Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s Plays, edited by Frances Teague (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994). David McCandless, “All’s Well That Ends Well.” From Gender and Performance in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies. Copyright © 1998 reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.

All’s Well That Ends Well in the Twenty-first Century

Helen Wilcox, “Shakespeare’s Miracle Play? Religion in All’s Well, That Ends Well.” From All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays, edited by Gary Waller (Routledge, 2006).

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INDEX q

All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), see also sexuality in play. See also characterization; key passages; language; plot of All’s Well; sources for play; summary of play autobiographical nature of, 159, 162n11 Bloom on, ix–x dating of, 61, 70n1 ending of, 23, 89–90, 90–91, 215 harsh critical treatment of, 23, 71, 72–73, 73–76, 101 as miracle play, 204–205, 207– 208, 210, 214–15 morality theme in, 72–73, 114– 115 new approaches to, 203–204 as problem play, 29, 60, 61, 105–107 audiences, of Elizabethan age, 79, 80, 95–96, 106 bed-trick, staging of, 192–197 female difference restored to play by, 197 Helena’s doubleness exacerbated by, 192–193 Helena’s goal in, 192 masculine-feminine polarity replaced by, 196–197

postcoital detention of Bertram, 193 setting scene for, 193–195 sexual symbolism of King’s ailment and, 195–196 Bertram, 13. See also under McCandless Bloom on, ix Boas on, 66–67 Clarke on, 42–43, 47 Coleridge on, 32–33 directorial attempts to redeem, 190–192 Griffith on, 26 Hazlitt on, 31 Johnson on, 26 Knight on, 121–126, 135–136 Lawrence on, 78–79 Lounsbury on, 72–73 rejection of Helena by, 67, 121–126, 130–133, 156, 186–187, 189 Schlegel on, 34 Tillyard on, 117–120 as unworthy of Helena, ix–x, 190, 201n43 Bloom, Harold, ix–x Boas, Frederick S., 60–69 overview, 60 on Bertram, 66–67 on Bertram’s rejection of Helena, 67 223


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224


on the Countess, 63–64 on Helena, 61–62, 64–66 on Lafeu, 69 on Lavatch, 69 mistaken identity plot as ingenious, 67–68 on Parolles, 68–69 problem play coined by, 60, 61 Shakespeare’s change of mood analyzed by, 60–61 Boccacio, as source, 14, 24–25, 31–32, 57–58, 61, 81, 83–84, 97n17, 105 characterization. See also names of specific characters division of, 167–168 list of characters, 13–14 realism of characters, 104–105, 114–120 subordinate characters and, 48 Clarke, Charles Cowden, 35–55 4th act opening of All’s Well, 54–55 overview, 35 Bertram as “dirty dog,” 42–43, 47 characterization in All’s Well, 48 Countess of Roussillon, 50 Helena as sweetest heroine, 36–42, 46 King of France, 48–50 Lafeu, 50–52 Lavatch, 44–45 Mariana, 52 Parolles, 48, 52–53 plot of All’s Well, 34–35 Steward, 46 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 32–33 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare), 164, 205 Countess of Roussillon, 13, 50, 63–64, 68, 111–112, 182, 193, 205, 208


couplets and sonnets, 107–111, 158 criticism of play. See specific century (e.g., eighteenth century) Crown of Life, The (Knight), 120 Decameron (Boccaccio), 14, 24–25, 57–58, 81 Diana, 14, 130, 134–135, 136, 182– 183, 209, 213 Duke of Florence, 14 eighteenth-century criticism overview, 23–24 Griffith, Elizabeth, 26 Johnson, Samuel, 25–26 Lennox, Charlotte, 24–25 Morgann, Maurice, 26–27 Elizabethan age audiences of, 79, 80, 95–96, 106 betrothal and, 95–96, 99n41 medieval attitudes of, 92–94 Elizabethan World Picture, The (Tillyard), 100 Elton, Oliver, 78, 79 Falstaff. See under Parolles Female Quixote, The (Lennox), 24 First and Second Lords Dumaine, 14 Free, Mary, 162–172 (mis)alliance between Bertram and Parolles, 169 overview, 162 All’s Well as comedy, 162–163, 171n1 characterizations of All’s Well, 167–168 domestic activities dominate play, 167–168 Helena achieves power through pregnancy, 169 Helena and other Shakespeare heroines, 165–166

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Index

Helena’s linguistic skills, 168–169 humor lacking in this “comedy,” 164, 167, 171n6 interaction between couple lacking, 164–65 inversion of public/domestic and mature/fool, 170 King as Helena’s true partner, 170 male-female role reversal, 166– 167, 171n10 marriage as expression of power, 163–166 marriage in All’s Well differs from norm, 163–164 metalanguage of power, 166–170 role reversal predominates, 170 Griffith, Elizabeth, 26 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 61 Hazlitt, William, 29–32 Helena, 13. See also under Knight; under McCandless Bloom on, ix–x Boas on, 61–63, 64–67 Clarke on, 36–42, 46 Coleridge on, 32–33 Griffith on, 26 as guiltless, 96 Hazlitt on, 29–30 Lawrence on, 77, 96 Lennox on, 24–25 Lounsbury on, 73, 78 Matthews on, 74 other Shakespeare heroines and, 165–66 Parolles and, 102, 106–107, 165, 174–177, 210 Schlegel on, 34 Tillyard on, 115–117 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 114


225

interpreter, 14 Johnson, Samuel, 25–26 Jonson, Ben, 3 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 61 Kenny, Thomas, 55–60 key passages, 15–19 act 1, 1 (29–212), 15–16 act 1, 2 (24–48), 16–17 act 5, 3 (293–301), 17 act 5, 3 (306–30), 17–19 King of France, 14, 48–50, 133–134, 153, 170 Kiss for Cinderella, A (Barrie), 91–92 Knight, George Wilson, 120–162 overview, 120–121 autobiographical nature of All’s Well, 159, 162n11 on Bertram in last act, 135–136 on Bertram’s rejection of Helena, 121–126, 156 on Helena, 137 Helena and a woman’s love, 139–144 Helena as miracle worker, 147– 158 Helena becomes Bertram’s salvation, 147 on Helena’s complexity, 160 Helena’s love as source of magical power, 144 Helena’s soliloquy of remorse, 146–147 king’s rejection of “miracle,” 153 on Parolles, 126–130 sonnets of All’s Well, 158 on women in Shakespeare, 137– 139, 146, 150, 159 Lafeu, 14, 50–52, 69, 112, 156, 186–187

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226


Language couplets and sonnets, 107–111 harshness of, 60 metalanguage of power, 166–170 religious, 205–206 sexually charged, 174–175 Lavatch, 13, 44–45, 69, 187–188, 208–209, 210–211 Lawrence, W. W., 76–100. See also Elizabethan age overview, 76 on Bertram, 78–79 Bertram compared to Cinderella’s prince, 91–92 ending of play summarized, 89–90 happily ever after ending acceptable, 90–91 on Helena, 77 husband’s acceptance of situation, 89 Le Livre du Très Chevalereax comte d’Artois et de sa Femme, 98n24 Le Livre du TrÌIIIes Chevalereax comte d’Artois et de sa Femme, 86–88 Mágusaga as source, 85–86 medieval attitudes interpreted by, 92–94 East as origin of story, 83–85 plot of All’s Well, 77, 81–82 theme of Boccacio story, 83–84, 97n17 translation of Paynter altered by Shakespeare, 81–82, 97nn15–16 woman’s cleverness and devotion emphasized in possible sources, 88 Le Livre du Très Chevalereax comte d’Artois et de sa Femme, 98n24 Le Livre du TrÌIIIes Chevalereax comte d’Artois et de sa Femme, 86


Lennox, Charlotte, 24–25 list of characters, 13–14. See also names of specific characters Lounsbury, Thomas, 72–73 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 55–56 Mágusaga as source, 85–86 Mariana, 14, 52, 95–96 Matthews, Brander, 73–76 McCandless, David, 172–202. See also bed-trick, staging of overview, 172 bed-trick integral to play, 172–173 bed-trick staging suggested by, 192–197 Bertram achieves “manhood,” 188–189, 201n41 Bertram as unworthy of Helena, ix–x, 190, 201n43 Bertram “captive before he serves,” 186 Bertram’s lack of father figure, 183–185 Bertram’s masculinity, 183–192 Bertram’s rejection of Helena, 186–187, 189 contradiction of female subjectivity, 177, 198n14 directorial attempts to redeem Bertram, 190–192 Helena and Parolles, 174–177 Helena compared to Virgin Mary by Countess, 182 Helena’s femininity, 173–183, 197n5 Helena’s “performative” femininity, 179, 198n20 Helena’s rejection by Bertram, 178–179 Helena’s sexually charged language, 174–175

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Index

Helena’s struggle with sexuality, 180–182, 199n28 Helena’s use of Diana, 183 Lavatch on Bertram, 187–188 male power of choice granted Helena, 177–178 soldiership denied Bertram, 185 two-actor approach suggested by, 179–180 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 33, 61, 77, 81, 101, 103, 106, 164, 211 medieval attitudes of Elizabethans, 92–94 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 60, 61, 104 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 162–163, 164 Morgann, Maurice, 26–27 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare), 33, 104 New Critical Essays on All’s Well That Ends Well (Waller), 203 nineteenth-century criticism, 29–69. See also Boas, Frederick S.; Clarke, Charles Cowden overview, 29 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 32–33 Hazlitt, William, 29–32 Kenny, Thomas, 55–60 Schlegel, A. W., 33–35 Paris, Gaston, 83 Parolles, 13 Bloom on, ix, x Boas on, 68–69 Clarke on, 48 Falstaff and, 27, 35, 52–53, 59, 75, 107, 114 Free on, 169 Helena and, 102, 106–107, 165, 174–177, 210


227

Johnson on, 25 Knight on, 126–130 McCandless on, 184 Tillyard on, 106–107, 115 passages, key, 15–19 plot of All’s Well That Ends Well analysis of, 101–102 described, 34–35 disagreeableness of, 77 Helena’s pilgrimage to shrine pivotal to, 211 as ingenious, 67–68 Lawrence on, 77, 81–82 rejection of Helena, by Bertram., 67, 121–126, 130–133, 156, 186–187, 189 religion in play. See Wilcox, Helen Richard III (Shakespeare), 107 Schlegel, A. W., 33–35 sexuality in play. See also Bed-trick, staging of Helena’s sexually charged language, 174–175 Helena’s struggle with, 180–182, 199n28 symbolism of King’s ailment, 106–107 as theme, 72, 106–107 Shakespeare, William All’s Well unworthy of, 76, 106– 107 biography of, 1–3 change from gaiety to gloom of, 60–61 characterizations of, 104 heroines of, 137–139, 146, 150, 159, 165–166 Jonson on, 3 speaking in own person, 112 writing of All’s Well, 55–58

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228


Shakespeare plays discussed Comedy of Errors, The, 164, 205 Hamlet, 61 Henry IV, 114 Julius Caesar, 61 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 55–56 Measure for Measure, 33, 61, 77, 81, 101, 103, 106, 164, 211 Merchant of Venice, 60, 61, 104 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 162–163, 164 Much Ado about Nothing, 33, 104 Richard III, 107 Taming of the Shrew, The, 61, 164 Tempest, The, 114–115 Troilus and Cressida, 61, 77, 81 Twelfth Night, 106, 164 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 162 Winter’s Tale, The, 114–115, 215 Shaw, George Bernard, x sonnets and couplets, 107–111, 158 sources for play Boccacio, 14, 24–25, 31–32, 57– 58, 61, 81, 83–84, 97n17, 105 Mágusaga, 85–86 spirituality in play. See Wilcox, Helen summary of play, 5–11 act 1, 5–6 act 2, 6–7 act 3, 7–8 act 4, 9–10 act 5, 10–11

assessment of play as failure, 101–103 characterizations of All’s Well, 104–105, 114–120 collaborators dismissed by, 109 Helena and Parolles, 102, 106– 107 on imaginative failure of Shakespeare, 110 morality theme in play, 114–115 plotting analyzed by, 101–102 on positive qualities of play, 111 problems of play, 105–107 realism of characters, 114 suffering in play, 111–112 theological tone of play, 113 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 61, 77, 81 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 106, 164 twentieth-century criticism, 71–202. See also Free, Mary; Knight, George Wilson; Lawrence, W. W.; McCandless, David; Tillyard, E.M.W. overview, 71–72 Lounsbury, Thomas, 72–73 Matthews, Brander, 73–76 twenty-first-century criticism, 203–216 overview, 203–204 Wilcox, Helen, 204–216 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The (Shakespeare), 162

Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), 61, 164 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 114–115 theological tone of play. See also Wilcox, Helen Tillyard, E.M.W., 100–120 overview, 100

Waller, Gary, 203 Wheel of Fire, The (Knight), 120 Wilcox, Helen, 204–216 overview, 204 bed-trick deemed no sin by Diana, 213 Bertram’s incantations, 210


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Index

Bertram’s “repentance” and Prodigal Son, 214–215 Diana and spirituality, 209 doctrinal issues mocked by Lavatch and Parolles, 208–209, 210–11, 210–211, 213–214 “happy ending” inconclusive, 215 Helena’s pilgrimage to shrine pivotal to plot, 211 Helena’s resurrection Christ-like, 214 as miracle play, 204–205, 207– 208, 210, 215 reformed theology confirmed, 211–212


229

religious devotion possibly superficial aspect, 212, 213 religious language used, 205–206 religious quality prevailing characteristic, 215–216 ring and Catholic symbolism, 212 sequence of miracles in last act, 214–215 spirituality overtones in play, 204 symbolism of relics, 211 term grace used in play, 209–210 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 114–115, 215 women in Shakespeare, 137–139, 146, 150, 159, 165–66

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All's Well That Ends Well (Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages)

alls wel that ends well

Owls Well That Ends Well